devtrackers.gg
Hey, marketing guy directly working on the mobile icon. Let me give some answers:
"Is this the new icon?" Nope, it's just a test. If it tests very well, then we would consider swapping it, but it would need to do a lot better than Darius. Still waiting on final results, but so far Darius has held off many attempts of being dethroned.
"Why would you change the icon?" - The icon is one part of how someone might make a decision to try the game, and we're always looking for ways to improve. You might have noticed recently all the screenshots on the store were changed as well; we tested those new screenshots and they worked better in displaying the game to new players, so we swapped. Different marketing folks have differing opinions on when to do an icon change (if ever), but I am personally a fan of continuously trying to improve. Tests on LoR are going to continue basically forever. We've already tested many icons at this point, but most folks haven’t noticed.
"Wow, a yelling person, how original" This is actually a major point of this test: does an icon in this style actually work better than what we have now? We have multiple champions, moods, and expressions we're interested in trying. However, this face is extremely common and given how ubiquitous this particular expression is, testing this first made the most sense.
"Why not the R, why not a Poro, why not etc.?" Some of those we've already tested and they didn’t perform as well as Darius, so we won’t be using them. Others might already be in our pipeline to test at some point.
"Why doesn't the art look like the game?" Icons tend to be super simple (for a very very long list of reasons) and the in-game art is highly-detailed. Any icon we try is attempting to find a balance between a very readable image with the art style of the game, and it's difficult to find. Like I said before though, it's a process of discovery and we'll see what works - we might end up finding an icon that blows Darius out of the water one day, or we might not, but we’ll keep testing!