Company Mindset & Culture
The company I am choosing to write about is one that I am very familiar with, Riot Games. As an avid League of Legends player for about 7 years, I have seen firsthand the culture and attitude that the Riot Games company has. I believe that their company attitude and culture is one that is based around aiming to please most of their players. Although Riot Games is a video game company, their only game available as of right now is called League of Legends. Thus, all of my examples will be taken from League of Legends “products”.
As I said, Riot Games bases a lot of their decisions based on the opinions of their player base. League of Legends has different characters called “champions”, and you get to choose which champion you want to play at the beginning of each game. You get to buy these products with real money or with in-game currency that you gain by playing. But, some champions were designed as far back as 10 years ago, so inevitably these champions will seem low-quality, slow, and lazy, in comparison to champions that have been released recently.
When this happens, occasionally Riot will choose one of these outdated champions and give them an update called a “rework”. Reworks improve the visuals and the gameplay design of a champion. Recently, Riot Games held a vote between 3 older champions that they felt needed a rework, and let their player base decide which one should be the priority for a rework. The vote was so close that they chose 2 of the 3 champions to work on at the same time! Their names are Fiddlesticks, the walking nightmare, and Volibear, the thunder bear. Their reworks are still in progress, so here you can see what they look like in-game versus the ideas Riot Games is coming up with.


Riot games has their own League of Legends forums, and their employees are also regulars on the League of Legends subreddit. Here they can see some criticism or praise that the player base might have on a certain issue.
In addition to champions, League of Legends sells “skins” for these champions, which can only be purchased with real currency. These skins provide no gameplay advantage and are purely for cosmetic purposes. Unfortunately, Sometimes Riot Games will design a skin that the community feels is lazy or just an overall bad idea. A recent example of this is with a skin called Dunkmaster Ivern. Ivern is a champion that is a humanoid, walking tree that loves the forest. The Dunkmaster skin design is meant to be a sporty, basketball jersey look. See the correlation? The playerbase didn’t. Along with being a skin that had no correlation or inspiration, it also looked lazily designed, and overall not worth the price they were selling it for. But, after lots of forum and reddit backlash, Riot Games responded to the criticisms and decided to update the skin by adding more graphics, color, and inspiration to the skin.
This, along with many other cases are just some of many examples of Riot’s player pleasing mindset.
Citations:
https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2019/07/fiddlesticks-and-volibear-dev-update-1/
https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Lee_Sin