2023 was a very unusual year for Leetify. Our own (rapid) growth led to some stability issues early in 2023, and then the CS2 release absolutely demolished our usual operations for the entire second half of the year.
You can read more about these struggles at the end of this article, if you're curious.
But for now, let's focus on the future! We think it's important to share our vision and the kinds of additions to Leetify that we think will help us get there.
Why we are building Leetify
At Leetify we’re all about helping you enjoy the game more. The core of Leetify’s experience today is our data-driven post-match reports that help you understand how you perform and uncover narratives for you to discuss after the match.
We want Leetify to be the place where you celebrate your best plays and compare accomplishments with your friends.
The social side of gaming really interests us. We think that competitive games have gotten so large as to jeopardize some of the sense of community they used to give us. We want Leetify to be a place for friendly competition, so that anyone can be a big fish in a small pond. We want it to be the place where you keep your trophy room and even find new gaming friends.
Leetify should have something for every player to enjoy, regardless of if you’re a hardcore Faceit level 10 or someone who prefers playing a few matches to unwind with your friends.
What we want to take on next
There are some areas we really want to invest in during 2024.
A word of caution: We learn new things all the time, and both our priorities and timelines change. Some of the things we want to do this year are too fragile an idea to be mentioned here. Some of the things we will talk about might be scrapped or delayed.
Still, we think it’s important to be transparent and share our thought process on how we are investing our time.
Clubs
We want Clubs to be the place in Leetify where you engage with your closest friends. It’s for the people that regularly find themselves in your lobby.
Friendly competition is one of the key driving forces we want to invest in with Clubs. Our first experiment with this was the leaderboard, which seems to have been well received by part of our user base. One of our gripes with the leaderboard today is that it can feel hopeless for some people who might consistently find themselves towards the bottom of the leaderboard. We want to create competition that everyone has a chance in, even if a Club has players of very different skill levels (like friend groups often do). This is one area we’re currently exploring.
Another area we’re exploring is for Clubs to be the space where you can share and celebrate each other’s accomplishments. We made some early attempts at this with the feed but don’t feel like we got all the way there.
Clubs have membership limits today, and a lot of you have reached out with your concerns on those. We added the membership limit because we want you to be thoughtful about who you invite to your Club. We think that some of the features we have in mind for Clubs will lose their value if you start adding people you don’t really care all that much about into your Club. That said, it’s clear that the current system is a bit too limiting. Resolving this is a big priority for us.
Beyond improving the existing features and user experience with Clubs, we will also be adding exciting new features. We hope Clubs can become a big fun-multiplier for when you play games with your friends. Who knows, there might even be room for some competition with other Clubs.
Leetify Rating
Since its launch, Leetify Rating has become incredibly popular and a lot of people are using it as THE metric to evaluate player impact.
However, we have been getting a lot of feedback on how LR could be even better, and we have been doing some deep dives into the data to follow up on those suggestions.
We’re planning another iteration of Leetify Rating in the near future. It’s unlikely that any single metric could ever be a perfect representation of a player's impact in a game as nuanced as CS, but we think we can get pretty close. We will keep iterating on LR until there’s no question it’s the best way to measure player performance.
Profiles
We want our profiles to be a snapshot of who someone is as a CS player.
Profiles have become very popular, but this popularity has come with some issues:
- Privacy - we’ve already started work on giving you more control over what data is displayed on your profile
- Anxiety - it saddens us that some people feel stress over a bad match and how it might reflect on their profile
Beyond those issues, we’d also like to give users a bit more control to make the profile “theirs”. Exactly how remains to be seen, but we’d like you to be able to show off your favorite accomplishments.
Profiles will need to change for another very exciting reason: Leetify is adding support for more games! League of Legends is up next - but more on that later. We want your profile to become a beautiful testament to your gaming history - regardless of the game you currently play.
Sessions
Based on the numbers we see, there’s a good chance you don’t even know what a Session report is. Even if you do, you probably don’t routinely use them. We think that Sessions are being held back by their direct connection to the Clubs feature, as well as the way we deliver them in Leetify. We’re investigating both of these issues.
We want Session reports to be the last thing you look at before you log off for the night, a summary-view that encourages you to reflect on a day’s worth of CS. We want them to help you find interesting trends, but also to see which one of your friends was absolutely cracked today and re-watch highlights of your group’s best plays.
Highlights
You’re all loving the highlights, and we want to do even more with them. Right now, we’re exploring ways to expand our partnership with Allstar and improve the user experience around highlights. Our goal is for the highlights we send you to be as relevant as possible, so that you’re getting clips for all of your favorite plays without needing to sit through anti-eco 2k clips.
Pro plan
For Leetify to be around a long time, we need to generate revenue. We think that the Pro plan is by far the best way to do this, as it aligns incentives between us and you as a user - for us to gain revenue, we need to be providing you with even more value.
We recognize that the responsibility is on us to make sure the Pro plan is compelling enough for you to open your wallet and support us. Adding more value to the Pro plan will be a larger focus for us going forward, and we hope to make it a no-brainer for you.
Content
We sit on a treasure trove of data that shines light on so many beautiful nuances in Counter Strike. We’ve been releasing content on a pretty ad hoc basis before, but going into 2024 we are taking our efforts here more seriously.
We are thrilled to welcome Danny "mahone" Hsieh to the Leetify team as he takes the lead on our content efforts.
We've discussed the possibilities for our content and with his extensive skillset, we are excited for him to find and share the beauty hidden in the chaos of many years' worth of Counter-Strike data.
We’ve already started on some really unique content that makes you think about CS differently. We hope you’ll enjoy it!
League of Legends
Perhaps the biggest bombshell of this whole list: We want to expand Leetify into multiple games. Many of you play more than one game, and a lot of players transition to different games over time. We want Leetify to be the product you seamlessly bring with you when that happens.
You should feel like you’re using the same awesome product regardless of the game. We also want to make sure that if you play just one game, you don’t feel any downside from Leetify integrating with multiple games.
If you’re a hardcore CS player that doesn’t care about other games today, this one might be the least interesting for you, but it’s one of the most exciting initiatives for us at Leetify. We’re convinced that if we zoom out over several years, this is one of the initiatives that Leetify users will receive the most value from, even those that only play CS.
That said, we’re still far from done with CS. Our current team will remain focused on our CS product and work on all of the things we listed above. We are bringing on new people that are as passionate about LoL to cross the bridge into the new game, so please reach out if you’re interested in working on that! Right now we have a role open for a Product Manager for LoL, and over the next few months we will start looking for developers and designers for this team.
Why was Leetify so quiet in 2023?
Coming out of 2022, we felt like the athlete who’d had their breakout year and everyone was expecting great things, only to have the season derailed by injuries.
We had great plans, but each time we got back up, there was something new ready to knock us down:
- The start of 2023 saw a massive influx of new users (yay!) which led to some severe infrastructure issues for us (yikes!).
- The release of CS2 saw us scramble to essentially rebuild Leetify from the ground up. This was a herculean effort, and our success just meant that you as a user would notice very little difference when the new game released.
- For 1.5 months in Oct/Nov 2023, Valve had to disable matchmaking demo recording and Leetify was unable to analyze your MM matches.
Tackling these issues had a bigger negative impact on us than we wanted them to. We learned some hard lessons and made many long-term investments to minimize the impact of issues like these going forward. We are heading into 2024 stronger than ever, and we are excited to keep improving Leetify!
Thanks for reading!
If you made it all this way, we’re humbled by your interest in Leetify.
Let us take this opportunity to give a big thank you for using Leetify and for giving us the feedback we need to improve.
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