2 Years of K/DA: Riot’s phenomenon that transcended its own game
November 3rd, 2018. Exactly two years ago I attended the 2018 League of Legends World Championship Finals in Korea, and I was waiting for the match to start, alongside 30,000 other fans, when four artists took the stage during the opening ceremony and held a spectacular performance of an up until then unreleased song. Little did I know that I was witnessing the birth of one of the most exceptional marketing campaigns in the history of gaming.
No one can deny that Riot’s original goal by creating K/DA was to advertise not only League of Legends, but also to sell the skins of the four champions that compose the virtual group. But it achieved much more than that. It became a pop phenomenon.
Two years later, the original Pop/Stars video has been watched almost 400 million times on YouTube, and the group has released two more singles, with the most recent celebrating the Finals of the 2020 World Championship. K/DA got bigger too, with Seraphine officially joining the group (and becoming a playable champion) after acquiring a huge social follower base, where she frequently “wrote” posts which resembled the ones of an upcoming artist walking the hard path towards stardom.
With K/DA, Riot showed how powerful the combination between gaming and pop culture can be — not only to promote a product or game, but to provide people with pure and genuine entertainment — regardless whether you actually play League of Legends or not. Because you don’t even need to know how the game works to enjoy the catchy songs and dance movements of the “artists”, so realistic and immersive that you forget for a moment that they are characters of an online game.
Not that their millions of fans across the globe really care whether they are real or not.
What do you think about K/DA and their massive impact in both gaming and music industries? Do you think we will be seeing more of these “Gaming X Arts” medleys?
