Measuring Availability the Player Focused Way: How Riot Games Changed Its Availability Culture

This conference talk from SREcon25 Americas explores how Riot Games transformed its availability culture by establishing a unified language around uptime measurement. Maxfield Stewart details Riot's journey in building an SRE culture since 2020, focusing on their primary challenge of creating consistent availability definitions across all teams and games. Learn how they developed availability measurements through strategic modifications to their incident management process and aligned both leadership and engineering teams on availability accountability using their core value of "Player Focus." Discover practical insights from a major gaming company's approach to defining and measuring service reliability in a way that prioritizes player experience.