The launch of its beta phase at the beginning of April had made a lot of noise. Valorant had reached more than a million viewers simultaneously on Twitch, even though the game hadn't yet been released and was only reserved for a handful of selected players who had retrieved a precious beta access.
As the weeks went by, its popularity declined until it lost the most viewed category to Just Chatting at the very beginning of May. It was expected that the official release, announced after only two months of closed beta, would give the latest game from Riot Games a new lease of life. It didn't.
According to Sullygnone, a site that gathers multiple statistics from Twitch, we can see that the peak of viewers at the official release of the game wasn't as good as that of the beta. If we compare a sample of the number of hours watched after the beta and after the official launch spread over seven days, this number has almost been divided by ten — 168.7 million hours for the beta versus 18.2 million hours for the official release.
With this score, Valorant didn't even make it into the top 5 most watched categories, namely Just Chatting, League of Legends, Fortnite, GTA V and Call of Duty.
How do you explain such a discrepancy? Several hypotheses have been put forward. One of them is the (controversial) use of Twitch Drops during the beta release. Riot Games had chosen to give only keys for the closed beta via Valorant streams. This practice naturally inflated the number of viewers worldwide, eager to get the precious sesame.
We can also mention the context, which is favorable to streaming. With more than half of the world's population confined since more or less the month of March due to the current health crisis, Twitch has recorded its biggest attendance since its launch.
Finally, Valorant is the second project unveiled by Riot Games after Legends of Runeterra. The fact that the publisher is so popular probably played a role on this record appeal.
Nevertheless, Valorant has yet to prove itself. Even though many professional players say that the game was released too early, it still has a lot of potential for improvement and will be able to claim great things in the world of esports.
Recently switched from Twitch to Mixer, Shroud let his mouth be heard and gave his impressions of Valorant in two Youtube videos. He discussed the lack of relevance of the Competitive mode, but also the differences between CS:GO and Riot Games' FPS.
