With just three weeks until the Beat Saber patch, we piled into a meeting room to map our publishing strategy—and review a few risks. What if the song had reached a level of saturation where players were tired of hearing it? Then they might not welcome an additional round of promotion. And the install base for virtual reality is still reasonably small, so what if we frustrated League players by promoting a VR experience that they had no access to? We didn’t want anybody to feel like we were trying to pressure them into buying an expensive VR headset.

But the chance of celebrating the genuine love of music and games we shared with Beat Saber outweighed the risks. So we pushed forward to give players a one-of-a-kind experience with “POP/STARS.”



FREE LAUNCH

The “POP/SABER project” (as we’d started calling it) landed in the December target patch on all the platforms that support Beat Saber—HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, and Windows Mixed Reality. The track was released for free so anyone who owned the game could try it.

Beat Games really went above and beyond to make the custom beatmap feel special for “POP/STARS.” They added K/DA Evelynn’s lashers to the map as well as a custom K/DA colour scheme. The song even featured a new difficulty tier, Expert+, to ensure a challenge for even the most hardcore players.

The team at Oculus mobilised in record time to create a mixed-reality promotional video featuring one of the real-life performers responsible for bringing K/DA to life. You’ve almost certainly heard of the concept of the win-win, which is something of a business cliche. But having Oculus make a premium piece of content that supported the launch of our song in Beat Saber was a win-win-win that benefited Oculus, Beat Games, and Riot all in one hacking, slashing package. Something like that almost makes you tired of winning... almost.