An E-Commerce Analysis and Reccomendation
Passion // Plan // Profit
The Site
I thought of groupbuy as part of an e-commerce application for a personal dream of an internship at Riot Games(Creators of the most played video game in the world; League of Legends). It's admittedly a simple site with no animations and a lot of static pictures and content that came from Riot Games. This was the first website I ever created (even before my personal portfolio) and it's what springboarded me into the world of web development.
Passion
I've done quite a fair share of case competitions and was quite accustomed to the process of analysing a business, identifying problems or opportunites and creating a plan to act. What differentiates Riot Games is that I started playing their game six years ago and followed the company from its cheesy inception in the founders basement to becoming the definitive industry leading e-sport with tens of millions of players and hundreds of millions in revenue, not to mention making Forbes list as one of the best companies in America to work for. I genuinely care about the future of Riot Games because it's my future as well. I put a lot of thought into the e-commerce suggestions I proposed, not because I want to win some prize or medal in a competition, but because I genuinely believe that they could improve the playerbase and the company.
Plan
The insipiration for this idea started by simply asking myself the question:
"What change to the current e-commerce practice would improve my own personal enjoyment of the game while at the same time creates an avenue for Riot Games to profit substantially from."
The gist of the idea for any non-gamers is that in the solely team based game that is League of Legends, the creators don't do too much to monetarily incentivize playing as a team.
I was amazed that indie games on Steam had a Group Buying system that gave massive discounts with profitable success and yet, the much bigger more capable Riot Games was not implementing the idea in any way.
Profit
As a private company, it was a bit harder to research the capabilities of Riot Games.
Admittedly, my projections were naive and didn't take into account a lot of the costs of setting up such a system and how GroupBuy would affect the other pricing patterns in their current ecosystem.
I based a lot of my projections extremely conservatively and bound it to some fundamentals about the game.
We could get current players to play more and buy more.
We could get ex-players to come back to play more and buy more.
We could create a reason for new players to play and buy in the first place.
With such a huge player base and potential, I recognized even a small change to pricing options could lead to promising results.
Key Takeaways
Ultimately, despite the unending passion for the game, the solid plan and profit potential, I was rejected for the e-commerce internship. I don't see this as the end of the road for me and Riot Games and hope to revisit e-commerce in some way shape or form. If anything, this is motivation develop my skills more, come up with better ideas and work harder. I still firmly believe there is a lot of potential for this idea and it's one of my goals to see it through to fruition. One day.