Valorant strikes the first blow — how the youngest esports discipline spent 2020

2020 definitely can’t be called the best year in history. The omnipresent COVID-19 pandemic was making everyone very nervous during the whole year, turning the habitual foundations upside down. The majority of industries collapsed, some of them are even on the brink of extinction (yes-yes, movies and cruises, we are talking about you). Self-isolation, the fatal disease, and not that many reasons to be happy. To be honest, these times are not the easiest ones.

But as we know, tough times born strong personalities. As you have already found with the help of the title of this material, Valorant has become this personality. Or not?

From the fire into the frying pan — how Valorant had conquered Twitch before its release

The first mention about the nameless project by Riot Games emerged in October 2019. During the birthday celebration, Riot demonstrated only a few minutes of gameplay. It definitely made some noise but there was no serious hype. But we saw the tsunami of hype in May 2020.

The game was announced on March 1, 2020, and Riot launched the Valorant closed beta test in April, which was the reason for the tsunami. Media persons, famous streamers, and content makers were the first to receive invitations. But regular players could get behind Valorant’s closed doors too. You could receive a key with the help of the Twitch-Drops program by simply connecting your Riot Games and Twitch accounts. This distribution system brought its results.

In the first month of the beta test, Valorant took over all charts and had 345 million viewing hours on Twitch. Users had a great desire to try Riot’s absolutely new product. The situation was similar in May, however, the numbers were way more modest.

The long-awaited release and slow obscurity

The run for beta test keys was over in May 2020. Riot Games announced the shutdown of Valorant servers for final preparations on May 28, 2020. The official release happened on June 2. However, the great furor that had been during the beta test period did not happen. Yes, Valorant was in the top 3 most popular PC games in its first months, losing only to Rainbow Six Siege and the elder brother in the face of League of Legends. The FPS shooter started declining in autumn.

The esports component

Talking about Valorant as an esports component, the developer of the game should be considered first. It is Riot Games, which makes everything clear, generally.

Valorant was initially designed for esports. Riot’s classic division into a big number of regions and the tournament system, about which we will talk below, and the concept of Valorant itself reflects this. It is difficult to make some conclusions in the first year of the support of the game because Riot tests different variants and looks for the best option for the realization of Valorant’s competitive potential.

Tournaments, tournaments, tournaments

Since the launch of official Valorant servers in June 2020, a great bunch of tournaments was played all over the world. The whole 102 tournaments were played in less than a year. And we don’t count qualifying championships.

Such a number of events reflects only one thing – Valorant is popular among players from different regions. It confirms Riot’s desire to develop esports both in large regions like North America, Asia, and Europe and in pretty exotic for traditional disciplines North Africa, Middle-East countries, and South America.

First Strike – a marker for the future

Continuing the section of thoughts about the format of esports competitions for Valorant, we can look back at the recently finished First Strike. In fact, the tournament was some kind of repetition before the upcoming big competitions. We will see Riot’s classic approach again: the rich division into regions, the unique system for each of them, and the distribution of the prize pool depending on the size of a region.

A similar scheme works in League of Legends but it has already grown into large franchise leagues, which are, actually, independent from Riot. We will find out in the nearest years if it works for Valorant.

Summing up

Valorant is too young to make certain conclusions. On one hand, it is a too popular discipline for regions like North America where well-famous organizations like TSM, Cloud9, FaZe have already created rosters and, on the other hand, it is an absolutely mediocre discipline for regions like CIS and China. The game has its uniqueness but it loses against the mastodons like CSGO, Overwatch, and Rainbow Six Siege.

It is pleasure to know that despite such a tough period for the release of the game (hi, Cyberpunk 2077), Riot Games made the release of the absolutely new game, which is not related to the League, as smooth as possible. The fact that the company will not leave its product and will work on its development and recreation into a really worthy esports discipline.

Finally, if you want to understand that Riot has made it after all, just try to remember how many decent esports games we received in the last years. I don’t remember any.