The closed beta release of VALORANT on April 7th saw it taking over the entirety of the internet within a matter of hours. Riot’s take on the genre of competitive shooters took Twitch by a storm as VALORANT streams across Twitch experienced an influx of viewers which kept on increasing with each passing second.
It wasn’t before long that the first-person shooter reached the previous all-time world record for viewer count on the platform, as the game reached 1.7 million concurrent viewers in only under a few hours since its closed beta release. While it’s true that the release of VALORANT was widely anticipated and hyped throughout the world, the primary reason for the humongous viewer count was in fact, due to the brilliant marketing by Riot Games.
Riot had declared that they’d hand out beta keys for VALORANT to everyone, but not in the conventional manner. They announced that the only way to receive beta keys in VALORANT would be to watch streams of specific VALORANT streamers on Twitch. The streams dropping beta keys were later changed to include any streamer streaming VALORANT on Twitch.
During that time, many said that the popularity of VALORANT on Twitch would be short-lived due to the nature of the marketing by Riot. However, one month later, it looks like VALORANT is still standing strong.
According to Esports charts, VALORANT has rocked the charts with a whopping 64.53 million hours watched in the last week on Twitch alone. Ever since its closed beta release, the game has booked a spot on the very top of the Twitch charts till now, and will probably be occupying the spot for months to come.
The shooter is followed by the Just Chatting category which stands just under 40 million hours watched in the last 7 days whereas Epic Games’ Fortnite lags way behind at 29 million.
With the beta keys for VALORANT still actively dropping, a high number of hours watched can be considered plausible. Yet, such an astonishing number of 64.53 million watched hours in one week is definitely not a small thing. Anomaly was the biggest streamer this week with 5.55 million hours watched and over 71,000 peak viewers.
This continuing hype and the aura of excitement surrounding VALORANT is certainly a good sign for the final release of the game which is scheduled to happen in summer 2020.Â
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