Around two years ago we started building out a section of riot.com as a video hub but killed the project. We were worried it wouldn’t improve on the experience of a YouTube playlist and we also got a little stuck on how to categorize the videos (does Get Jinxed go in a music videos section or a champion section?).

I’m still not sure about the YouTube question, but this definitely shows we were overthinking it with the categories, lol. It’s an awesome list.

That was definitely an option we were looking at. The content management system we use for riot.com is a little funky so we hit a couple barriers in terms of providing a nice, slick UI while still serving videos in a way where you could find what you were looking for quickly. It was either a long boring list of links or endless scrolling (for the longer categories). All solveable stuff but it kept coming back to the YouTube playlist experience being hard to beat.

As we were working on the project it also felt like it was getting further away from its original purpose which had been to celebrate the partners we work with on these. We ultimately just started editing the video descriptions to add credits like we’ve been doing since “Welcome Aboard” (for Odyssey) or shortly after.

I’d still like to revisit this project because we have so much good stuff that it’s easy to forget about some of the hidden gems. Especially as we’ve gone multiproduct I dream of a central hub with all the cool sh*t the teams across different games and esports are making.