Insights Analyst Iii - Central Strategic Insights

The Insights discipline helps empower Rioters' decision-making to be more data-informed. We're an interdisciplinary group of scientists, consultants, and strategists from all sorts of backgrounds who join together to represent and advocate for gamers around the world. We believe that illuminating the globally diverse experiences, behaviors, and needs of gamers is essential to Riot living up to our player-focused mission. We're a group united by our love of games, science, and helping others succeed.

As an Insights Analyst III on the Central Strategic Insights team, you will use your expertise in competitive analysis, market forecasting, cost estimation, and gamer empathy to inform strategic and operational decision-making for all new major R&D games at Riot. You’ll work with game developers to help them understand the opportunity and audience for their game in order to better tailor their product for success in the market. You'll combine your deep familiarity with industry trends with rich datasets for the audience, revenue, and cost sides of video game development. You’ll become familiar with sophisticated modeling & forecasting techniques to give senior decision-makers a nuanced understanding of each prospective game’s ROI profile. Working as part of the larger Strategic Advisory team in R&D, you will also contribute to overall game product and operational strategy, such as prioritizing which game opportunities we are pursuing as a company. You will report to the Head of Strategic Analytics and Forecasting for Games on the Strategic Advisory group in the Riot Discovery Studio.

Responsibilities:

• Work with game teams to develop models of their target audiences so they can better tailor their games towards those players and solicit their feedback during development
• Integrate data from user and market research into models of which types of player will choose to play our future games
• Gather and organize competitive intelligence on the gaming market, triangulate between publicly-available data points, third-party purchased research, and data-informed inferences to estimate competitors' performance, and operationalize this information into decision-making
• Estimate the opportunity size and development cost associated with various genres in order to inform Riot’s priorities for new games
• Forecast the income statement or “virtual P&L” for in-development games to inform strategic (e.g. portfolio management) and operational decisions (e.g. infrastructure and headcount planning)
• Interface with other internal experts on development cost (e.g. operations, finance, tax, accounting) as well as internal financial tooling to build a picture of the costs of development, launch, and publishing

Required Qualifications:

• Deep personal passion for games, the gaming industry, and how to delight players
• Meaningful knowledge of a wide variety of genres, including team-based online, competitive, and cooperative games
• Bachelor's degree and 6+ years (or 4+ years with an MBA) of professional experience in: Finance, Consulting, Strategic Planning, Tech Product Analytics, or other related experience with significant exposure to financial analysis, modeling, and planning
• 3+ years of experience building models to inform strategic and operational decision-making
• Foundational finance / accounting knowledge with the ability to translate high-level input and ideas into financial statement analysis and scenario models
• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to craft reports and presentations; comfort communicating with senior executives
• Advanced proficiency with Excel or Sheets
• Proficiency with Tableau and SQL

Desired Qualifications:

• Professional experience in the gaming industry
• Experience leading complex efforts with multiple collaborators
• Experience working with entertainment product teams in the early lifecycle from inception through production
• Adaptability, comfort in ambiguity

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise and a collaborative spirit that prioritizes the delight of players. We will look at your past studies and experience, but for this role, we also look for dedicated people with a personal relationship with games. If you embody player empathy and care about players' experiences, this is the role for you!

Our Perks:

Riot has a focus on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy, in addition to other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our benefits pages for more information.

Riot Games fosters a player and workplace experience that values teamwork embodied by the Summoner's Code and Community Code. Our culture embraces differences as a strength, and our values are the guiding principles for how we approach work. We are committed to putting diversity and inclusion (D&I) at the center of everything we do, and promoting a fair and collaborative culture where Rioters treat one another with dignity and respect. We encourage you to read more about our value of thriving together and our ongoing work to build the most inclusive company in Gaming.