Valorant has undoubtedly been one of the biggest releases of 2020 in the world of video games. With the closed beta starting in early April, the tactical shooter by Riot Games managed to attain a significant player base by its official release on June 2nd. According to an announcement from Riot, Valorant saw an average of about 3 million players logging daily into the game towards the end of the beta.
Valorant also managed to gain immense success on streaming platforms during its beta, accumulating over 470 million hours watched by its fans on Twitch and a Korean platform AfreecaTV. Phwoar within the short time frame.
The reason for this humongous number of hours watched lies primarily behind the method Riot used to distribute the beta keys for the game. To put it simply, Riot made it compulsory for fans to watch the game for a certain time period on Twitch in order to be eligible for a beta key drop.
Valorant closed beta ended on May 28th, with the servers going offline till the official release. Since then, the game experienced three acts over six months, with each act bringing in a plethora of new content to the game. The developers have also consistently shipped updates to the title aiming to keep the game balanced.
However, Valorant wasn’t free from complaints from its player base. Throughout the span of Episode 1, fans have raised repeated demands for Riot to fix underlying bugs, overpowered agents, or game-breaking glitches in the shooter. It can’t be denied that these problems, along with the arguably repetitive gameplay have negatively affected the overall player count of the title.
Episode 2 of Valorant has just started a few days ago, and now would be an ideal time to find out if the player base of the game is depleting from what it used to be.
The accurate player count of Valorant hasn’t been revealed by Riot Games since the closed beta ended, making it difficult to accurately determine the game’s current state. However, the Twitch viewership of Valorant tournaments have been increasing steadily over the past few months. The North American Valorant First Strike event landed over 300,000 peak concurrent viewers during the time it aired, with the total number of views being over 2,000,000.
Riot’s plans involving the growth of Valorant in 2021 also seem to be quite promising. The start of Episode 2 has already introduced a bunch of new content to the title alongside the new agent Yoru that has been appreciated by fans worldwide. Moreover, the highly anticipated Valorant Champions Tour is set to begin January 27th, and it’s certain to be one of the biggest esports events this year.
With that being said, it can be safely said that Valorant isn’t dying anytime soon. Valorant is currently shining bright both as an esport title and a competitive video game, and will likely continue to do so due to the efforts the developers are putting in behind it.
