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The “largest PC strategy game in the world,” Teamfight Tactics, has a pretty unusual stance on players leaving the game. According to Peter Whalen, TFT game director at Riot Games, that’s fine! Especially if your design philosophy is specifically built around the idea that folks will leave, but also they will return.
During a Teamfight Tactics panel at GDC 2025 attended by GamesRadar+, Whalen admitted that most games hit players “with mechanics like daily quests, progression loops, and deep meta systems” in combination with events and limited-time content in order to “improve engagement frequency and reduce churn,” but over time this causes the overall audience to shrink, “coalescing around their most core players.”
“But what if we wanted a game that lasted forever?” he posited. “We can’t rely solely on acquisition, or we’ll run out of players. We have to realistically assume that players are going to churn – there are only so many hours in the day for them to engage. So that only really leaves one option, which naturally leads to the question, what if we went all-in on reacquisition?
“And that’s the heart of cyclical reengagement. It’s a strategy around planning for players to churn, and going all in on creating big moments for them to come back.”
Churn it down (and up)
Saying that is fine and dandy, but actually designing around this philosophy isn’t particularly simple. There still needs to be big moments, and players need “to have a great time” upon return. It also requires that the team “be in lockstep with publishing” because “it doesn’t matter if you’ve got the best content in the world if nobody knows about it.”
Actually accomplishing this “means avoiding the sigh of relief,” according to Whalen, because “you need your players to leave happy.” He pointed to the kinds of games that prioritized retention, which we’ve all played, that felt like a weight off our chests when they were finally deleted.
“Finally, your players have to have fun when they come back,” he added. The game needs to be both familiar and novel – “it’s a tricky line to walk, and at least for us, it’s something that we think about constantly.”
It needs to feel fair with a level playing field across play skill and progression while avoiding regret.
“Players can’t feel bad about the time that they missed,” Whalen continued. “It means that their account can’t be behind, and there can’t be cool, limited-time content that they’ll never be able to get.”
But there’s a reason why so many of these design choices are popular. Retention is good, right? And all of this serves to improve monetization, right? That’s all still true, but, at least for Teamfight Tactics, short-term metrics do not appear to be the end all, be all.
“Short battle passes, limited daily quests, all cut into how much you can keep players in your ecosystem in the short term, but it can pay off a lot in the long-term,” said Whalen.
“For one, it’s just more player-focused, and people notice that. It aligns with your incentives really well – as a dev, you want people in it for the long haul, and that means making choices that build player trust, rather than spending it.”
If you’re not currently playing Teamfight Tactics or are simply looking for something similar, be sure to check out our ranking of the best strategy games.