RIVAL PEAK at the Halfway Point: Lessons Learned So Far
- After six weeks, Facebook users have consumed over 30 million minutes of the RIVAL PEAK franchise
- Episodes of RIVAL SPEAK, a companion show hosted by Wil Wheaton, have over 22 million views
- Over 600,000 Facebook users have registered for RIVAL PEAK, which is most popular in India, the United States, Mexico, and Brazil
- Users have generated over 400 million points to save the characters from elimination
- Launching Jan 20: RIVAL PEAK instant game comes to iPhone
Introduction
We are now six weeks into RIVAL PEAK’s twelve week story. RIVAL PEAK is the first ever “MILE”, or “Massive Interactive Live Event”. And “Massive” is the key word: millions of people participate in Rival Peak each week. They’re now in control of the story, not Facebook (which distributes the experience), Genvid (which powers it) or Pipeworks and DJ2 Entertainment (the creative leads.)
We are also very excited to announce that the RIVAL PEAK Instant Game, which has supported Android, PC and Mac since launch, is supporting iPhones as of today.
When RIVAL PEAK began, it looked like a digitally animated reality show. There were 12 AI contestants, each with a different background, fighting to survive in the pacific Northwest. And each week, our companion show RIVAL SPEAK, hosted by Wil Wheaton, guided us deeper into this world, its secrets, and its characters.
Things started to get weird. Fast. In week one, Jeb saw a haunted axe float through the makeshift camp. Soon after, Antonio began experiencing strange dreams. Then the audience started to join in. A group of “puzzlers” solved riddles that helped the castaways traverse the map, but a sudden earthquake stranded half the cast. As they ran through the haunted woods to survive, they uncovered a secret bunker, only to be forced into a post-apocalyptic wasteland by a mudslide. There was too much strangeness; too much coordination. Fans quickly pieced together that the mysterious Tangram Labs, the so-called “sponsors” of RIVAL PEAK, might have sinister motives.
At our midway point, five of these 12 contestants have been eliminated — all based on scores generated via user input. But in week six, these characters are back. Kind of. They’ll now be joining our remaining heroes in “the bunker”, where they’ll be on a side quest of sorts, separately helping us, the audience, try to unravel the mystery behind RIVAL PEAK.
RIVAL PEAK By the Numbers
Across its RIVAL PEAK Instant Game, RIVAL SPEAK companion show, and fan pages, RIVAL PEAK as an experience delivered more than 30 million minutes of entertainment over its first six weeks.
Our streamer-hosted “co-streams”, which dive into the audience’s most popular conspiracy theories, saw nearly 50 thousand concurrent viewers on a single stream.
And RIVAL SPEAK episodes are over 22 million views and growing quickly by the day.
The RIVAL PEAK Instant Game has over 600,000 registered users across desktop and Android. Most of these users are in India, the United States, Mexico, and Brazil. Our streams work anywhere Facebook works.
Every minute watched, every dialog read, every vote cast and every participatory event tapped by our users generates a handful of points for a specific character. Today, over 400 million points have been generated and we’ve seen big changes in which character is the most popular as fans have created campaigns to save them from elimination.
One popular romance, between Winter and Saabun, created the #swinter and #savewinter campaign, which promptly took over our chats.
RIVAL PEAK: Producing Live TV shows, Live Streams, and A Live Game As a Live Service
Although we know what some RIVAL SPEAK segments will be in advance, we really don’t know who will be eliminated each week because the user’s engagement decides it. As a result, we have to rapidly change dialogue, scenes, animations to release RIVAL SPEAK each week.
Users scores are counted Saturday to Friday, with cutoff for the upcoming episode coming on Friday evenings to give us the weekend to adjust. We shoot with Wil on Mondays, and produce and edit on Tuesdays.
On Wednesdays, the instant game goes into a brief downtime to let us load up the new week’s worth of content, and an episode of RIVAL SPEAK airs at 6pm PT, followed by new streams at 6:30pm PT.
Most of the time a new week starts with a major event cutscene, but occasionally those scenes come later in the week. For the majority of users who are in different time zones, we clip the cutscenes and other key moments of the show into “Today on RIVAL PEAK” segments that let people catch up quickly.
We have 24/7 QA and 24/7 marketing teams who respond to user’s issues, post new content to the character pages, and ensure that the streams are up and healthy. We also have a 24/7 live operations team who fix the streams if something happens, or push new code to the instant game if we get a bug. Or if the AI just gets stuck on a wolf for 20 minutes, like what happened two days ago.
Lessons Learned
The MILEs category is new. The RIVAL PEAK tech stack is unique, a technical challenge built in the difficulty of a global pandemic. As such, we held off on marketing for the first two weeks so that we could do bug testing, learn, and adjust.
We needed to more clearly explain ‘what to do’ for new users
Many users discover RIVAL PEAK via our live streams, which sit at the top of the RIVAL PEAK page. The live streams were originally a clean feed, meant to be watched inside the instant game, but the streams without the instant game’s UI led to confusion. We thought that video descriptions and comments would suffice, but they did not.
Within a few days of launch we had created a lower-thirds dialog explaining what was happening that week, but it still wasn’t clear enough. From this week we have a CNBC-like banner with ways to get to the instant game, an explanation of this week’s events, and more.
We also, in our first three weeks, completely redid our in-game tutorial. It didn’t click for a good number of users, and so we took their feedback to heart and improved the tutorial just before the holidays. We have another major improvement to the tutorial coming next week.
We needed a 24/7 community team
Because of RIVAL PEAK’s popularity around the world, we were constantly receiving questions from countries as far as Vietnam, Philippines, and India. This meant that when we woke up on Eastern and Pacific Time, up to 12 hours had passed and we had a lengthy backlog, particularly as we have 14 different pages we manage between the main page, app page and character pages, all of which have posts and updates.
We’ve since moved to a 24/7 community team and this has massively improved new user onboarding and growth.
We benefited hugely from adding live streamers
When we first envisioned Rival Peak we saw it as an interactive TV show. We thought that was enough interactivity for audiences. And for most fans, it is! But many people still want to interact with a real human, too. And so around Christmas, we started experimenting with “co-streamers” who would guide the audience through the newest updates, read/perform character dialogues, and make their own impact on the game.
This was an enormous success. At first, thousands were watching live so that they could cheer on and coach the co-streamer (just like a traditional live broadcast). But quickly, the audience started joining in live. The audience, the co-streamer, and our AI characters were collaborating in real-time, in a shared simulation, and to decide the fate of RIVAL PEAK. We now have a nightly co-stream.
What’s Next
We keep updating RIVAL PEAK based on user feedback. One of the biggest requests was support for the iPhone, which we were finally able to bring in as of today.
We also recently added the ability to watch RIVAL SPEAK inside the Instant Game. In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding viewer Achievements and a map of where the characters are at. We’ll also be adding an inventory system that will show what each character is holding, as this will help the audience more efficiently achieve its collective goals.
I’m so excited for where RIVAL PEAK is today. On December 2nd 2020, we launched after only nine months of development (all of which was during the COVID-19 pandemic). We’ve been stable, handling the incredible scale of user interactions without issue. There’s a lot more to come, but we plan on continuing to learn (and respond to) our current audience’s love while also finding ways to reach even more Facebook users around the world.
