Why is Valorant rapidly gaining popularity?
This game from the studio Riot Games not only brightened up the quarantine of gamers due to the coronavirus but also showed an incredibly successful start.
On the first day of the closed beta testing, 1.7 million watched the shooter on Twitch. Thus, Valorant instantly left Fortnite and CS: GO behind in views. Although, until recently, the developers could only boast of their League of Legends MOBA. Now Riot Games is launching several projects at once and is going to become one of the most important players in the industry.
Ambitious development and explosive release
The history of the mysterious shooter from Riot Games began back in 2018. At that time, esports was the only truly large and popular team shooter – CS: GO. This discipline has hosted many large tournaments with a good prize pool, but the game suffered from a lack of attention from Valve. The game had (and still remains) an extremely loyal fan base, but the creators did not please it with major updates and almost did not deal with the esports system.
Suddenly, the community began to flicker more and more information about the development of a direct competitor to Counter-Strike, which will throw the overdue king from the throne of the best esports shooter. Fans of the genre were especially hooked by the fact that the developer is Riot Games – a company that knows how to create a healthy competitive system and spectacular tournaments, which it has already proven over the 10 years of League of Legends existence. The first official information about Valorant appeared in October 2019, when the developers showed a gameplay trailer for the shooter, which was then still called Project A.
The first big tournament
A tournament for a fresh shooter took place in early June – immediately after the release of the game. Its format also raised many questions from viewers: instead of a serious championship, Riot, together with Twitch, hosted the Twitch Rivals event, where teams of streamers and some players from other disciplines participated. The tournament was raffled off for $ 200,000, and although the competition was watched at its peak by more than 80,000 people on Twitch, many fans were sure that the money would be better invested in the competition of real teams.
Valorant may lose a significant portion of the audience that was in the game since the release, and it will be difficult to build a tournament system that is convenient for everyone. However, despite this, in the first months after the release of the game, it is noticeable that the developers still care about the project and they will invest all possible resources in it. And this is the main thing for esports.
Although Valorant is unlikely to become the sole king of all esports action films, with the right support, it is quite capable of being a major discipline and competing with other industry giants.
