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Riot Games said that its first-person shooter game Valorant has reached 14 million monthly active PC players and half a billion games played in its first year.
And Los Angeles-based Riot Games said it will expand the franchise to mobile gaming. The numbers mean that 14 million players around the world log on to play the free-to-play game each month. The game launched on June 2, 2020, in the midst of the pandemic.
It’s fair to say that Valorant has emerged as one of the most prominent FPS games available on PC. Riot Games plans to add to the community with a mobile game. That’s big news for Riot, which took a decade to come out with more games beyond its huge money maker League of Legends. And, as many Riot fans joke, now the company can live up the plural part of its name.
Anna Donlon, executive producer of Valorant, said in a statement that the goal for the year was to earn the trust and respect of the global FPS community. She said Riot is thrilled to soon offer the experience to more global players.
Above: Valorant debuted in June 2020.
Image Credit: Riot Games
Riot also launched the Valorant Champions Tour to support the game’s growing competitive scene. The tour is a year-long, global esports circuit featuring three levels of competition: Challengers, Masters, and Champions. The second major event of the 2021 Champions Tour and Valorant’s first international tournament, VCT: Masters Stage 2, took place this past week in Reykjavík, Iceland. According to initial reports, the final match between Sentinels and Fnatic garnered more than a million concurrent viewers, and an average minute audience of over eight hundred thousand.
Riot is hosting a month-long celebration where it will gift in-game rewards and give commemorative digital swag to players.
Valorant pits two teams of five players against each other to win a round-based, attackers vs defenders, best-of-24-rounds gunfight. Riot has invested in dedicated 128-tick servers for all global players, for free, and it built custom netcode in pursuit of precise hit registration. It also created server authoritative game architecture and proprietary anti-cheat prevention and detection from day one.
In a statement, streaming star Tyler “Ninja” Blevis said, “What made Valorant resonate with me initially was that I loved the abilities paired with the high-skill gameplay. The graphics looked super clean. Also, everything that Riot touches turns to gold, so I couldn’t pass up jumping on this game. I imagine I’ll play Valorant for a while. I haven’t been streaming lately, but I’m still playing off stream. I love playing games with my friends and I don’t anticipate stopping anytime soon. With how often Riot is updating the game and adding new content, that’s all any game lover could ask for. Valorant will definitely continue to grow and keep their audience.”
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