Rift Tour Featuring Ariana Grande
Event Time: August 6th - 8th, 2021
Description: Rift Tour Featuring Ariana Grande was an interactive concert experience featuring music from the late Juice WRLD, Marshmello, LSD (Sia, Diplo, Labrinth), Wolfmother, Ariana Grande, and the late Mac Miller. Ariana Grande was the headliner of the show, and some of her most popular works were featured. During the show, players were transported to all new worlds to explore and enjoy while they listened to the music. The show played for a weekend and had an advertisement in New York’s Times Square!
Execution: Although we previously had experiences delivering concerts from Fortnite and Travis Scott Present: Astronomical, there was a whole new set of challenges to overcome with Rift Tour. The first challenge was having such a high number of partners for this event. Ariana was the headliner and the main focus of the show, but with all the other musical partners involved there were a lot of legal elements to the show. Not only that, but we had to be extra conscious of our work to prevent leaks in the workflow.
One of the reasons we had so many partners for Rift Tour was because we wanted the show to be a completely new experience. Outside of the initial show launch and the after show, there were no elements of the show that occurred on the Fortnite island. In this regard, pretty much everything for the show had to be built from the ground up. This presented a workflow challenge as we had no previous experience to build off, and everything was newly delivered to the players.
In addition to new environments to explore, Rift Tour also offered players a new way to play and experience events. For this show, we added a new set of challenges that offered themed cosmetics before, during, and after the show. This wasn’t entirely new as we did something similar with Travis Scott, though it was just for a pre show. However, players tracked and completed these challenges through a Rift Tour social tab in the game lobby. Not only was this social tab used to track challenges, but players could RSVP to the shows and squad up with their friends for any one of the five shows. This social tab was also build from the ground up as a new experience for our players to explore exclusively though this concert.
For me personally, Rift Tour was a new experience because I was not the owning analyst on the event. We hired a new analyst in the events space, and she served as the owner of Rift Tour. I built the testing framework and asks in the early stages of development, and then handed off ownership to her. This was critical to universal success because it ensured the event testing asks were allocated for using my past experience, but gave her an opportunity to grow her skills and adjust to the Epic workflow while owning this event.
