Rocket League Leverages Zesty.io for E-Sports Site Celebrating Players and Tournaments
Several years ago, Psyonix, the creators of Rocket League, set out to find a content management system that could help them create a site for their players to consume content related to the professional side of Rocket League.
Their goals were to create an active community, reduce development time and increase agility while producing consistent content.
The team selected Zesty.io as their content management system and scored right out of the gate.
While considering Zesty.io, the Psyonix team looked at other companies' successes on the platform. One that stood out was Sony's Alpha Universe, a site used to engage Sony's Alpha photographer community. Psyonix thought they could also showcase their highly active, tight-knit community of Rocket League Esports teams and players.
Goal 1: Leverage influencer marketing to support millions of players and fans
With over 40 million unique players and 1.1 million players a day on average, the team at Rocket League is fostering and growing a vast community. They have been able to harness the power of influencer marketing and highlight individuals within their community to exponentially grow.
They needed a CMS solution that would:
Get their new site off the ground quickly
Be able to scale with their users
Maintain brand standards
With everything able to be managed within one platform at scale, without extra plugins or development work, Zesty.io became the obvious choice.
"Community polls, audio players, and other cool widgets and CMS plugins can be customized with Zesty.io, whereas there was not as much flexibility to brand certain elements like that using previous systems. Many of those would have to be outside plugins that didn’t really gel with our brand style."
Goal 2: Grow the professional side
As Rocket League continues to grow, they innovate new ideas, leveraging Zesty.io as their content hub. They are able to produce content consistently, maintaining excitement around their product.
"Our community loves new content and hearing about new updates for the game, and in turn, we enjoy finding new ways to improve on the concept of Rocket League while keeping the core gameplay concept intact. Depending on the in-game content, we’re able to create and deliver additional promotional content to the community on the site and beyond," says Lemmon.
As the community grows, the marketing team continues to grow and support tournaments with payouts of hundreds of thousands of dollars and televised on networks such as Twitch and Turner Broadcasting.
The Esports website is the hub for the professional energy surrounding Rocket League.
How Rocket League uses Zesty.io: managing relational content
The content throughout the Rocket League website is highly relational: players are related to teams, teams to tournaments, tournaments to outcomes, and everything in between. This complexity can get out of hand if not managed properly.
With Zesty.io's highly intuitive platform, community managers are able to update content once and see those changes updated wherever that relational content appears on the site, ensuring the most up-to-date data in a world where statistics are changing by the moment. Time is saved and content consistency is maintained.
"We publish blogs on the site almost every weekday and landing pages at least once per quarter. That is easier since switching to Zesty.io since even content creators on our team (that can’t code) can implement changes on the site and publish new content without the assistance of an outside team," says Lemmon.
Talk about a score.
By Chloe Spilotro
Hooked onto the platform since first using it through the Zesty.io Incubator Program at the University of San Diego. Passionate about all things marketing, IoT, and helping businesses leverage technology to grow and become major players in their industries.