I’ve played this game for 10 years and it feels like Riot exclusively focuses on maintaining current users rather than growing new users.
Examples:
- I rarely ever see ads for downloading LoL.
- Champion releases have not slowed down. There is a huge learning curve for new player to understand what all ~170 champions do.
- Although the player tutorial has been fixed some years back, for a long time it was not a good reflection of how the game is actually supposed to be played. To me this shows they don’t really care about having a good tutorial.
- The meta changes frequently and new users have to adjust when they might have just learned to play a certain way. This can be either exciting for players or a turn-off.
- I’m sure there are several more examples that I can’t think of but I may drop in more throughout the day.
There are other marketing channels like the ones you mentioned but we don’t actually know how impactful it is for new user growth. I imagine it helps but ultimately, if the new player experience is shit like you said, that will be the biggest hurdle to growing long-term users. You can market as much as you want, but if the NPX is not good, you will obviously convert less users to long-term.
This is why I think they don’t really prioritize new user growth. The NPX is shit and they prioritize other areas in the game. Obviously they do care to an extent and they probably have a team focused on growth, but they seem to care more about maintaining current users.