The success of Valorant – Alive and well

When you try and picture a game hitting worldwide success in its first year as a co-op FPS title, you would think it might make a few local tournaments, maybe an event or two.

In some cases, titles hit it off with a bang and go straight for the big leagues with world championships within their first two years of being released.

Valorant is such a title and offers a lot of promise in the range of potential growth for casual players and professional gamers who wish to compete in tournaments for their share of the prize pool.

Tired of reading? Check out our video below talking about the history and esports growth of Valorant.

This title was first released on the 2nd of June, 2020 and grew so much in popularity that it had an average daily player count of 1,992,894 recorded on 30 June 2020.

The numbers didn’t stop there, though. There was a record-breaking 34 million hours watched recorded on the first day, nearly breaking the Twitch viewer record with 1.7 million viewers.

A lot of factors need to be taken into account to understand why something would have such a big success, and marketing played a significant role, but this game also scratched an itch that players couldn’t get rid of.

This point was further proven when Valorant recorded an average of 22.5 million players worldwide this year.

Since the initial growth spurt in 2020, the player base went on to show an astonishing recording of 20,616,144 average monthly players around the same time as the recording for the daily players.

With such high numbers, it’s no surprise that the first World Championship took place in Berlin, Germany, from 1 December 2021 through to 12 December 2021 and boasted a prize pool of $1,000,000.00 (almost 18.3mil ZAR)

The first World Championship title went to Acend after beating Gambit eSports, and they took home the trophy, the crown of the first champions, and their share of the prize pool at $350,00.00.

Things only got better from there, and we saw the second World Champions tour take place in Istanbul, Turkey, where LOUD beat OpTic Gaming 3 -1 and took home their share of $300,00.00 from the $1,000,000.00 prize pool.

This only makes me more interested in seeing what the three-week 2023 Valorant World Tour will hold in store, announced by RIOT – The Valorant Champions tour, set to start as early as 14 February 2023 in Sao Paulo.

Header image via Riot Games.