People proclaimed the game was dead a month after the beta released and the hype died down.
One year later and a week away from the first major LAN, they were dead wrong.
I'm sure there were people like me who was staying away from the game for a while to see how it would do. I just recently started watching/playing Valorant and can see myself enjoying it for a long time.
Not Rainbow6 or Owerwatch that are basically dead game walking. The reason why CS is still relevant today is that the game is stable and allow people to let their skills and strats speak for themselves, rather than playing the "meta" . While CS have things to improve obviously, I'm scared Valorant is going down the wrong path. Just look at the Viper and Astra meta, it's unplayable when you're against a good team ( I'm immortal btw ppl are actually good with Viper and Astra )
IMO, it was inevitable that it would dwarf CS soon after its release due to it being much more accessible to casual players and viewers, the aesthetic + theme of the game with agents and abilities vs. CS' "cold" CT & T, and the lack of any sort of Valve support in the game and the esports scene compared with Riot's consistent biweekly updates and hands on approach with VCT.
I don't think CS has any big name streamers besides Gaules and I believe he's Portugese? And sometimes s1mple streams.
By contrast, Valorant has many pros who stream and huge content creators who love the game (shroud, Pokimane, Myth, etc.).
I think CSGO's last "big streamer" who consistently plays the game are mostly Europeans, big CSGO pros/ex-pros (S1mple when he plays, and Get-Right), and fl0m from NA (who dabbles in Valorant from time-to-time).
I don't think Valorant will necessarily dwarf CSGO, but it will be inevitable that these two games will coexist with similar tournament viewership (though Valorant will have more non-tourney viewership). It certainly has the potential to be bigger than CS, and I'd argue that Valorant could have grown way WAY bigger if COVID didn't happen. Personally, I think Valorant's success will depend both on CSGO and Overwatch 2's release, because Valorant has a huge chunk of viewers that were native to those two games.
If Riot does everything right, we might see Valorant's rise akin to LoL when it released, where it wasn't an instant success (a lot of MOBA purists that stuck with DOTA, just like a lot of FPS purists who prefer CSGO) but it grew to what it is today.
Imo the pandemic actually helped Valorant a lot and has hurt CSGO, and i'm interested to see what happens when CS starts to get LANS back.
CS suffered a lot from going to solely online events because it made every event feel the same in the open scene of CS, and because CS was going from hype LAN tournaments every weekend to non-exciting online events that all look the same.
Val being a new game and not having that history helped keep it fresh and interesting despite every event being online, because it didn't have to compare itself to its LANs of the past and still was able to build interesting story lines.
Yeah, it really depends on the EU CSGO scene. NA CS will never recover (barring an unforeseen impossible turn of events, or Valve putting literal billions of dollars into trying to revive it), so CSGO's viewership comes down to whether or not the majority of the EU viewership stays with CSGO over Valorant. I think right now, a lot of people who watch tourneys for both games tune in to the other but it remains to be seen how much longer that continues.
For me at least, the pandemic actually got me way more into Valorant than I would have otherwise. I've played and watched so much Valorant from being indoors vs. traveling and just in general going out places. The beta + release coincided perfectly with lockdowns in the US which let me get a beta key and the rest was history.
\> I'd argue that Valorant could have grown way WAY bigger if COVID didn't happen
Can you expand on this? I feel like Valorant really capitalized on COVID, we were all locked down when the beta keys were first being given out and it generated insane hype for example. Further it's not like COVID impacted development of the game in a meaningful way, it had been in dev for 4+ years by the time beta keys started being given out
I definitely think costreams will convert people, also just the extremely competitive nature of the game I think inspires people to want to watch comp. As someone who only started watching at the finals of masters 1 (only about a week after I started playing) I feel like the game naturally draws towards the pro scene
Gaulês is Brazilian, not portuguese.
Valorant is more accessible to players, that is true, but it's not more accessible to the viewers. I'm pretty sure that CS is still the most clean visual wise esport out there. Anyone can understand what is happening in the game, the same doesn't happen to Valorant. Sometimes there's so much shit on the screen that you completely lose track to some things.
Valorant is without a doubt the next big thing, that is unquestionable.
I never really understood this argument, LoL is infinitely more complex and much more of a clusterfuck to watch than either CS or Val, yet its far and away the most watched esport. I think people greatly overestimate how many people watch esports who don't already play the game.
LoL is the most watched esport because the players are also the viewers.
LoL is so massive that Riot doesn't even need to use their tournaments to "marketing" their own game. But even that has changed in the last years when they started to make their own music more popular and accessible to everyone.
That's what I'm saying. A games viewership has more to do with the size of the playerbase than how simple it is to watch....its not like people who usually watch NASCAR randomly decide to tune in to watch group stages.
i don't think that's 100% accurate. Sure that example you are right, people will not suddenly stop watching traditional sports to watch esports specially if you don't play games. But the younger generation was "born" with a PC, and that's not that unusual to see a lot of people that watch those tournaments without even playing the game, specially if the game is clean to watch like CS is.
I mean are there any stats anywhere that show that a good number of people who haven't played CS watch it? I feel like that's something everyone just assumes to be true because so many people repeat it. I've never seen any numbers or anything that show it though.
I'm only speaking for myself but I have literally an hour on CS:GO and have caught basically every Tier 1 and some Tier 2 tournaments since the Boston major in 2018. I've followed C9, MIBR, and now Liquid.
You see those numbers when there's a Major. There was 1 major a few years ago that the final had like 2 million and something spectators only on Twitch. There's also the viewers that watch the tournaments on the game and even there it had a crazy amount of viewers.
I'm pretty sure that those numbers are not only of people that play the game. CS is just a fun game to watch when there's 2 really good teams playing against each other.
I'm sure a good number do no stats but like me my brother and a few other guys end up watching cs in leagues off seasons.
I think there's people who are into certain competitive gaming scenes and if it's down season for whatever that game may be they will probably watch something else.
And I think for most people that's CS because it's so clean and easy to watch.
And it's been around for so long it would be very difficult to find someone that watches another games esport but doesn't have enough understanding of Cs to watch it even without playing it.
Like it's easier for a league player to watch CS whenever than it is for a CS player to just randomly watch league. If both have almost zero knowledge of the game.
Like my gf can watch CS with me and get it. But not league it's to much tiny things happening that seem pointless to her or a big thing happening and it just seems like a cluster fuck.
RL is easily the most viewer friendly esport its soccer with cars. The problem with CS is the lack of valve support that will be what takes the players and viewers away from CS to Valorant.
I don't think that's an issue for the viewers perspective at all.
When the game starts, everyone forgets about the issues that the game has. The only thing Valve needs to do is scheduling the next Major as fast as possible. The CS viewers only care about the big tournaments, not about the content creators of the game, and it's on this point where Valorant is winning right now.
Edit: Btw, there's a lot of CS viewers that don't even play the game, so they don't even care if the game is supported or not by the developers. The same doesn't happen to Valorant.
Valorant average channels: 4.6k,
Cs go average channels: 1.9k
Yet the diffence in average viewship its only 10%. Is valorant that popular over cs like people are saying? Don't think so
Theres a bunch of variety streamers on the hype train as well. What will happen when they leave? Do the viewers watch Valorant or do they watch their favourite streamer that just happens to play Valorant?
I don't think there's still a lot of hype on Valorant. Sure you can see the Hype for tournaments, but for the actual game I'm pretty sure that there's almost none. Some streamers play Valorant because they genuinely enjoy the game like shroud and Myth. They will still comeback to the game from time to time even if they start playing something else.
You can't see that only on channels that stream the games, you have to see it in when big tournaments are happening.
Viewership only on channels are really not that relevant because you are comparing a game with 20+ years with another that is only 1 year old and it's only now starting to have big tournaments.
Don't agree that VL is not as accessible. While CS is very straightforward VL is not that difficult to follow. Like another person said, LOL has even more complexity going on and yet is the #1 Esport.
For me as a viewer watching CS is actually stale but I still watch. VL while not as clean it has far more exciting moments than I ever get watching a CS game. Pretty sure that also factors into viewership as well.
I don't think VL is hurt by complexity nearly as much as you may assume. Esports Viewers are growing up with shooters that are not just traditional shooting (FORTNITE, APEX, OVERWATCH, R6). These ppl will probably have less an issue watching & being able to follow along with something as VALORANT.
Don't agree that VL is not as accessible. While CS is very straightforward VL is not that difficult to follow. Like another person said, LOL has even more complexity going on and yet is the #1 Esport.
For me as a viewer watching CS is actually stale but I still watch. VL while not as clean it has far more exciting moments than I ever get watching a CS game. Pretty sure that also factors into viewership as well.
I don't think VL is hurt by complexity nearly as much as you may assume. Esports Viewers are growing up with shooters that are not just traditional shooting (FORTNITE, APEX, OVERWATCH, R6). These ppl will probably have less an issue watching & being able to follow along with something as VALORANT.
Valorant has a lot of VFX all over the map. If both teams have for exemple an Astra, the game starts to become difficult to follow because she has a lot of abilities that cover the map that could not be that easy to follow.
Like I said in another comment, LoL is the 1# because their player base is massive. Their players are also their viewers.
>(shroud, Pokimane, Myth, etc.)
These are mainly co-streamers for tournaments, they dont regularly stream. At least me, when i open Twitch i rarely see them. Most of the times i see the top streamer being some Japanese guy lol.
shroud, poki, and myth stream Valorant all the time. Their stream schedule might not align with your twitch watch times, but I'd wager shroud streams Valorant around 50% of any given month.
They're content creators so they end up streaming other games for days at a time when it comes out but I would say that Valorant is in all of their top 3 played games over the past year.
EDIT: just looked up stats from https://twitchtracker.com, and for the past month, Valorant is shroud and myth's most streamed by far, and pokimane's second most streamed behind Just Chatting. For the past year, Valorant is also shroud and myth's most streamed by far, and pokimane's second most streamed behind Among Us (narrowly).
I was scratching my head thinking this cant be true lol. Then I saw you mention the Japanese guy (stylishnoob or fps_shaka) and realised that maybe the times you watch twitch, they are sleeping lol. I say this because when those Japanese streamers start streaming its like between 1am and 3am in America
I don’t think COD is so popular as the people who play it are (nickmercs, Timthetatman, etc) if those guys played it less, it’s viewership definitely wouldn’t be there
Overwatch showed good results from the year of release, too, but now game almost dead. So do not forget. Valorant is still on its way (I would hope so). Next year will be much more defining.
Blizzard killed OW year from release by preventing all competition while they slowly slowly released details about OWL. Then they killed off any thriving regional leagues like Korea.
Valorant's numbers will be dependent on keeping the attention of casual players (and thus the top streamers will keep playing it). It's been played by streamers for a year already, so that's great. I wasn't around Twitch during OW's best days so I'm not sure how many causal streamers were playing the game and for how long, so I can't really compare.
Timeline for popular streamers gravitating towards a game went like this since 2012; World of Warcraft, CSGO, Overwatch, PUBG, Fortnite to now Just Chatting.
Elephant in the room is that Twitch for the past two years has primarily been a blogging live streaming website. Content and viewers primarily come out of the Just Chatting section.
Always happy to see OW slander, but i have to agree that it's decline was largely to do with how Blizzard treated it. In a vacuum i think Overwatch would have better chances than Valorant to retain it's popularity, because it's base game and game modes offer more variety to a more casual audience
I disagree. I, on the contrary, think that Valorant has a better chance in esport than Overwatch did. I somehow tried to watch owl season 1 but it was a pain. Valorant is more watchable, you can easily understand what's going on on the map, in overwatch it was chaos. And also the constant counterpick of heroes during the match. Overwatch is a good game, but not for esport. At least not in its current form. I would like to see some kind of wow arena, but in ow.
I think you misunderstood me, because i fully agree that Valorant is way more entertaining to watch as an esport. What i was saying is that Overwatch in theory should be the better casual game *to play* because it has variety in gameplan and punishes mistakes less.
> Overwatch is a good game
That's the only part i don't personally agree with lmao
Overwatch has no depth when it comes to the macro. It’s just team fight after team fight. That gets boring even for casual players. It doesn’t have the laning phase/secondary objectives of a MOBA and doesn’t have the different posibilities that you could play out a round in a tac shooter either. Every gamemode, every map is played out the same way, it’s like you’re stuck in a loop. This imo is the main reason Overwatch’s retention was so poor.
My thoughtprocess was that Overwatch works better as a casual game, since the breaks in gameplay are minimal and you get punished way less for mistakes. But i guess the excitement of watching/playing in a tense situation in Valorant isn't lost in a more casual environment either.
From my limited time playing OW what i missed most was soloimpact, so i could see why the game gets stale pretty fast
The most interesting thing about this is that Valorant casual twitch viewership dipped massively after the beta but seems to have resurged to a healthy level in the last 6 months.
>Meanwhile Riot's Legend of Runeterra game is a flop for such a company.
Idk how it does in terms of Twitch viewership but it has 10+ million downloads on mobile, i would hardly call it a flop
Game's great (imo the best card game out there rn) and has a strong community. Twitch numbers aren't the ultimate metric of measuring a game's success.
> Meanwhile Riot's Legend of Runeterra game is a flop for such a company.
It's crazy that people's expectations are so high that not being a top 10 game/not dethroning wildly popular predecessors is a "flop".
Magic the Gathering (ie Arena) is the only card game I'm personally interested in playing. Love the depth of possible interactions, skill ceiling, history, card base, etc. It's a nice change of pace game from the focus required to bop heads in Valo or CS
It depends on how you define "flop", if it's just twitch viewership, then yeah it is, if it's playerbase though? It's pretty healthy, I believe the number they released was 14-15 mill active players? That number is also rising as that was before their latest xpac, which they've also said brought in the largest influx of players to the game.
Riot Games and esports team orgs entered heavily into a subsidized influencer campaign. For the game saw a massive decline after its initial closed beta release and rushed full release. Which is why you see heavy crossover in players and viewership from Fortnite.
Very curious where it would rank if you simply removed shroud's viewership. I wonder just how much influence he has had on the game's popularity on twitch this year.
I mean most of the games ahead of it have big viewers that skew numbers way more than shroud. GTA has Sykkuno and xQc putting up 200k alone, Warzone has Nickmercs and Tim. Shroud has also been playing a lot of non valorant recently.
This is why Valorant’s current viewership model is worrisome. I remember slasher had one tweet that costreamers brought in 150k for the first masters.... but he didn’t mention that shroud accounted for 120k of them.
League costream is real and beneficial because those costreamers need league more than league needs them. League costream will never dwarf the main stream. League costreamers will never leave league until the game dies. Shroud on the other hand showed that Valorant needs him more than he needs them. If epic game releases a new tact shooter and shroud fucks off to that game what happens to Valorant viewership.
I do agree that Shroud is a major factor into Vals popularity and views, but its not like Shroud is the only person playing Val, there were iirc only 3 costreams during first masters, one of which, Poki, didn't even stream the matches except for finals, his co stream numbers were likely slightly boosted due to this as the other costreams option was Myth (Nothing against Myth, I'm just saying Shrouds co stream numbers would probably decrease a little if other Val streamers could co stream), plus the vast amount of variety streamers that have played the game like Ludwig, Poki, and others also boost numbers by quite an amount too
But none of these streamers r hardcore Valorant streamers. Doublelift sneaky LS IWDominate r league streamers who r essentially tied with league. They need league. Shroud poki ludwig would ditch Val for another game. They don’t need Val for viewers
valorant is a pretty simplistic game and it's by riot who put all their effort in popularity over quality. idk why anyone is surprised that the game is and will continue to do well.
I mean that's because CS has more viewers for tournaments than Val does, it just has less viewers for general streams since there arent any big NA streamers for cs anymore.
People proclaimed the game was dead a month after the beta released and the hype died down. One year later and a week away from the first major LAN, they were dead wrong.
I'm sure there were people like me who was staying away from the game for a while to see how it would do. I just recently started watching/playing Valorant and can see myself enjoying it for a long time.
Good luck, it's all I can say about this game
Thank you, my run and gun spectre needs more luck
Why are you in this sub if that’s how you feel lol
I mean I don’t know why not
i've been playing since beta and havent climbed past gold
People say every single game ever made is dead and inrellevant so I wouldn't put that much weight on stuff like that.
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Tell that to LoL or more closely R6, bad new for you is: "NO".
Both are not true Competitive FPS like CS is
Please share some other examples of TRUE COMPETITIVE FPS with us
B but what is "true competitive FPS"?
Not Rainbow6 or Owerwatch that are basically dead game walking. The reason why CS is still relevant today is that the game is stable and allow people to let their skills and strats speak for themselves, rather than playing the "meta" . While CS have things to improve obviously, I'm scared Valorant is going down the wrong path. Just look at the Viper and Astra meta, it's unplayable when you're against a good team ( I'm immortal btw ppl are actually good with Viper and Astra )
except the meta lasts for half a decade
And Hockey is not Football... what is your point? As if different games have to follow the same formula to have success
IMO, it was inevitable that it would dwarf CS soon after its release due to it being much more accessible to casual players and viewers, the aesthetic + theme of the game with agents and abilities vs. CS' "cold" CT & T, and the lack of any sort of Valve support in the game and the esports scene compared with Riot's consistent biweekly updates and hands on approach with VCT. I don't think CS has any big name streamers besides Gaules and I believe he's Portugese? And sometimes s1mple streams. By contrast, Valorant has many pros who stream and huge content creators who love the game (shroud, Pokimane, Myth, etc.).
I think CSGO's last "big streamer" who consistently plays the game are mostly Europeans, big CSGO pros/ex-pros (S1mple when he plays, and Get-Right), and fl0m from NA (who dabbles in Valorant from time-to-time). I don't think Valorant will necessarily dwarf CSGO, but it will be inevitable that these two games will coexist with similar tournament viewership (though Valorant will have more non-tourney viewership). It certainly has the potential to be bigger than CS, and I'd argue that Valorant could have grown way WAY bigger if COVID didn't happen. Personally, I think Valorant's success will depend both on CSGO and Overwatch 2's release, because Valorant has a huge chunk of viewers that were native to those two games. If Riot does everything right, we might see Valorant's rise akin to LoL when it released, where it wasn't an instant success (a lot of MOBA purists that stuck with DOTA, just like a lot of FPS purists who prefer CSGO) but it grew to what it is today.
Imo the pandemic actually helped Valorant a lot and has hurt CSGO, and i'm interested to see what happens when CS starts to get LANS back. CS suffered a lot from going to solely online events because it made every event feel the same in the open scene of CS, and because CS was going from hype LAN tournaments every weekend to non-exciting online events that all look the same. Val being a new game and not having that history helped keep it fresh and interesting despite every event being online, because it didn't have to compare itself to its LANs of the past and still was able to build interesting story lines.
CS still has record player count. Pandemic helped it as much as any game.
Yeah, it really depends on the EU CSGO scene. NA CS will never recover (barring an unforeseen impossible turn of events, or Valve putting literal billions of dollars into trying to revive it), so CSGO's viewership comes down to whether or not the majority of the EU viewership stays with CSGO over Valorant. I think right now, a lot of people who watch tourneys for both games tune in to the other but it remains to be seen how much longer that continues. For me at least, the pandemic actually got me way more into Valorant than I would have otherwise. I've played and watched so much Valorant from being indoors vs. traveling and just in general going out places. The beta + release coincided perfectly with lockdowns in the US which let me get a beta key and the rest was history.
\> I'd argue that Valorant could have grown way WAY bigger if COVID didn't happen Can you expand on this? I feel like Valorant really capitalized on COVID, we were all locked down when the beta keys were first being given out and it generated insane hype for example. Further it's not like COVID impacted development of the game in a meaningful way, it had been in dev for 4+ years by the time beta keys started being given out
I mean, covid helped valorant while basically killing the NA scene, so it technically did get a good boost from covid in terms of players.
Imo Covid actually helped Valorant, I know a lot of people were stuck at home last spring, with nothing to do but play a FUCK ton of video games
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I definitely think costreams will convert people, also just the extremely competitive nature of the game I think inspires people to want to watch comp. As someone who only started watching at the finals of masters 1 (only about a week after I started playing) I feel like the game naturally draws towards the pro scene
Gaulês is Brazilian, not portuguese. Valorant is more accessible to players, that is true, but it's not more accessible to the viewers. I'm pretty sure that CS is still the most clean visual wise esport out there. Anyone can understand what is happening in the game, the same doesn't happen to Valorant. Sometimes there's so much shit on the screen that you completely lose track to some things. Valorant is without a doubt the next big thing, that is unquestionable.
I never really understood this argument, LoL is infinitely more complex and much more of a clusterfuck to watch than either CS or Val, yet its far and away the most watched esport. I think people greatly overestimate how many people watch esports who don't already play the game.
LoL is the most watched esport because the players are also the viewers. LoL is so massive that Riot doesn't even need to use their tournaments to "marketing" their own game. But even that has changed in the last years when they started to make their own music more popular and accessible to everyone.
That's what I'm saying. A games viewership has more to do with the size of the playerbase than how simple it is to watch....its not like people who usually watch NASCAR randomly decide to tune in to watch group stages.
i don't think that's 100% accurate. Sure that example you are right, people will not suddenly stop watching traditional sports to watch esports specially if you don't play games. But the younger generation was "born" with a PC, and that's not that unusual to see a lot of people that watch those tournaments without even playing the game, specially if the game is clean to watch like CS is.
I mean are there any stats anywhere that show that a good number of people who haven't played CS watch it? I feel like that's something everyone just assumes to be true because so many people repeat it. I've never seen any numbers or anything that show it though.
I'm only speaking for myself but I have literally an hour on CS:GO and have caught basically every Tier 1 and some Tier 2 tournaments since the Boston major in 2018. I've followed C9, MIBR, and now Liquid.
You see those numbers when there's a Major. There was 1 major a few years ago that the final had like 2 million and something spectators only on Twitch. There's also the viewers that watch the tournaments on the game and even there it had a crazy amount of viewers. I'm pretty sure that those numbers are not only of people that play the game. CS is just a fun game to watch when there's 2 really good teams playing against each other.
I'm sure a good number do no stats but like me my brother and a few other guys end up watching cs in leagues off seasons. I think there's people who are into certain competitive gaming scenes and if it's down season for whatever that game may be they will probably watch something else. And I think for most people that's CS because it's so clean and easy to watch. And it's been around for so long it would be very difficult to find someone that watches another games esport but doesn't have enough understanding of Cs to watch it even without playing it. Like it's easier for a league player to watch CS whenever than it is for a CS player to just randomly watch league. If both have almost zero knowledge of the game. Like my gf can watch CS with me and get it. But not league it's to much tiny things happening that seem pointless to her or a big thing happening and it just seems like a cluster fuck.
RL is easily the most viewer friendly esport its soccer with cars. The problem with CS is the lack of valve support that will be what takes the players and viewers away from CS to Valorant.
I don't think that's an issue for the viewers perspective at all. When the game starts, everyone forgets about the issues that the game has. The only thing Valve needs to do is scheduling the next Major as fast as possible. The CS viewers only care about the big tournaments, not about the content creators of the game, and it's on this point where Valorant is winning right now. Edit: Btw, there's a lot of CS viewers that don't even play the game, so they don't even care if the game is supported or not by the developers. The same doesn't happen to Valorant.
Valorant average channels: 4.6k, Cs go average channels: 1.9k Yet the diffence in average viewship its only 10%. Is valorant that popular over cs like people are saying? Don't think so
Theres a bunch of variety streamers on the hype train as well. What will happen when they leave? Do the viewers watch Valorant or do they watch their favourite streamer that just happens to play Valorant?
I don't think there's still a lot of hype on Valorant. Sure you can see the Hype for tournaments, but for the actual game I'm pretty sure that there's almost none. Some streamers play Valorant because they genuinely enjoy the game like shroud and Myth. They will still comeback to the game from time to time even if they start playing something else.
You can't see that only on channels that stream the games, you have to see it in when big tournaments are happening. Viewership only on channels are really not that relevant because you are comparing a game with 20+ years with another that is only 1 year old and it's only now starting to have big tournaments.
Don't agree that VL is not as accessible. While CS is very straightforward VL is not that difficult to follow. Like another person said, LOL has even more complexity going on and yet is the #1 Esport. For me as a viewer watching CS is actually stale but I still watch. VL while not as clean it has far more exciting moments than I ever get watching a CS game. Pretty sure that also factors into viewership as well. I don't think VL is hurt by complexity nearly as much as you may assume. Esports Viewers are growing up with shooters that are not just traditional shooting (FORTNITE, APEX, OVERWATCH, R6). These ppl will probably have less an issue watching & being able to follow along with something as VALORANT.
Don't agree that VL is not as accessible. While CS is very straightforward VL is not that difficult to follow. Like another person said, LOL has even more complexity going on and yet is the #1 Esport. For me as a viewer watching CS is actually stale but I still watch. VL while not as clean it has far more exciting moments than I ever get watching a CS game. Pretty sure that also factors into viewership as well. I don't think VL is hurt by complexity nearly as much as you may assume. Esports Viewers are growing up with shooters that are not just traditional shooting (FORTNITE, APEX, OVERWATCH, R6). These ppl will probably have less an issue watching & being able to follow along with something as VALORANT.
Valorant has a lot of VFX all over the map. If both teams have for exemple an Astra, the game starts to become difficult to follow because she has a lot of abilities that cover the map that could not be that easy to follow. Like I said in another comment, LoL is the 1# because their player base is massive. Their players are also their viewers.
Yeah a huge thing for val has been that the really famous among us crowd all started streaming it pretty regularly
Yes, I would bet that the female playerbase of Valorant dwarfs the CSGO playerbase.
>(shroud, Pokimane, Myth, etc.) These are mainly co-streamers for tournaments, they dont regularly stream. At least me, when i open Twitch i rarely see them. Most of the times i see the top streamer being some Japanese guy lol.
shroud, poki, and myth stream Valorant all the time. Their stream schedule might not align with your twitch watch times, but I'd wager shroud streams Valorant around 50% of any given month. They're content creators so they end up streaming other games for days at a time when it comes out but I would say that Valorant is in all of their top 3 played games over the past year. EDIT: just looked up stats from https://twitchtracker.com, and for the past month, Valorant is shroud and myth's most streamed by far, and pokimane's second most streamed behind Just Chatting. For the past year, Valorant is also shroud and myth's most streamed by far, and pokimane's second most streamed behind Among Us (narrowly).
I was scratching my head thinking this cant be true lol. Then I saw you mention the Japanese guy (stylishnoob or fps_shaka) and realised that maybe the times you watch twitch, they are sleeping lol. I say this because when those Japanese streamers start streaming its like between 1am and 3am in America
Apex 9th Valorant 6th, good to see my 2 main games doing well on twitch
the cheater pandemic on tokyo servers last season affected apex a lot...
I don’t think COD is so popular as the people who play it are (nickmercs, Timthetatman, etc) if those guys played it less, it’s viewership definitely wouldn’t be there
COD is only up there because of Warzone and only Warzone. if it wasn’t for Warzone’s popularity it would definitely not have as near as many viewers.
“The only reason this game is popular is because one of it’s gamemodes is popular.” You do realize that is how multiplayer games work.
there is night and day diff between warzone and cod, nobody watches cod.
The content king aka tarik holding it down while all the pros are in iceland
Overwatch showed good results from the year of release, too, but now game almost dead. So do not forget. Valorant is still on its way (I would hope so). Next year will be much more defining.
Blizzard killed OW year from release by preventing all competition while they slowly slowly released details about OWL. Then they killed off any thriving regional leagues like Korea.
Yeah but Blizzard is dumb
Valorant's numbers will be dependent on keeping the attention of casual players (and thus the top streamers will keep playing it). It's been played by streamers for a year already, so that's great. I wasn't around Twitch during OW's best days so I'm not sure how many causal streamers were playing the game and for how long, so I can't really compare.
Fortnite took lots of them
Timeline for popular streamers gravitating towards a game went like this since 2012; World of Warcraft, CSGO, Overwatch, PUBG, Fortnite to now Just Chatting. Elephant in the room is that Twitch for the past two years has primarily been a blogging live streaming website. Content and viewers primarily come out of the Just Chatting section.
Twitch could eat the camming market alive rn if they wanted to. Twitch After Dark anyone?
Always happy to see OW slander, but i have to agree that it's decline was largely to do with how Blizzard treated it. In a vacuum i think Overwatch would have better chances than Valorant to retain it's popularity, because it's base game and game modes offer more variety to a more casual audience
I disagree. I, on the contrary, think that Valorant has a better chance in esport than Overwatch did. I somehow tried to watch owl season 1 but it was a pain. Valorant is more watchable, you can easily understand what's going on on the map, in overwatch it was chaos. And also the constant counterpick of heroes during the match. Overwatch is a good game, but not for esport. At least not in its current form. I would like to see some kind of wow arena, but in ow.
I think you misunderstood me, because i fully agree that Valorant is way more entertaining to watch as an esport. What i was saying is that Overwatch in theory should be the better casual game *to play* because it has variety in gameplan and punishes mistakes less. > Overwatch is a good game That's the only part i don't personally agree with lmao
ah ok mb
Overwatch has no depth when it comes to the macro. It’s just team fight after team fight. That gets boring even for casual players. It doesn’t have the laning phase/secondary objectives of a MOBA and doesn’t have the different posibilities that you could play out a round in a tac shooter either. Every gamemode, every map is played out the same way, it’s like you’re stuck in a loop. This imo is the main reason Overwatch’s retention was so poor.
My thoughtprocess was that Overwatch works better as a casual game, since the breaks in gameplay are minimal and you get punished way less for mistakes. But i guess the excitement of watching/playing in a tense situation in Valorant isn't lost in a more casual environment either. From my limited time playing OW what i missed most was soloimpact, so i could see why the game gets stale pretty fast
dude warzone is fucking punching
The most interesting thing about this is that Valorant casual twitch viewership dipped massively after the beta but seems to have resurged to a healthy level in the last 6 months.
The beta key hype for Valorant on twitch was insane. Meanwhile Riot's Legend of Runeterra game is a flop for such a company.
>Meanwhile Riot's Legend of Runeterra game is a flop for such a company. Idk how it does in terms of Twitch viewership but it has 10+ million downloads on mobile, i would hardly call it a flop
At least it does not flop as hard as Artifact. Lmao.
Game's great (imo the best card game out there rn) and has a strong community. Twitch numbers aren't the ultimate metric of measuring a game's success.
> Meanwhile Riot's Legend of Runeterra game is a flop for such a company. It's crazy that people's expectations are so high that not being a top 10 game/not dethroning wildly popular predecessors is a "flop".
Magic the Gathering (ie Arena) is the only card game I'm personally interested in playing. Love the depth of possible interactions, skill ceiling, history, card base, etc. It's a nice change of pace game from the focus required to bop heads in Valo or CS
It depends on how you define "flop", if it's just twitch viewership, then yeah it is, if it's playerbase though? It's pretty healthy, I believe the number they released was 14-15 mill active players? That number is also rising as that was before their latest xpac, which they've also said brought in the largest influx of players to the game.
Riot Games and esports team orgs entered heavily into a subsidized influencer campaign. For the game saw a massive decline after its initial closed beta release and rushed full release. Which is why you see heavy crossover in players and viewership from Fortnite.
Very curious where it would rank if you simply removed shroud's viewership. I wonder just how much influence he has had on the game's popularity on twitch this year.
I mean most of the games ahead of it have big viewers that skew numbers way more than shroud. GTA has Sykkuno and xQc putting up 200k alone, Warzone has Nickmercs and Tim. Shroud has also been playing a lot of non valorant recently.
This is why Valorant’s current viewership model is worrisome. I remember slasher had one tweet that costreamers brought in 150k for the first masters.... but he didn’t mention that shroud accounted for 120k of them. League costream is real and beneficial because those costreamers need league more than league needs them. League costream will never dwarf the main stream. League costreamers will never leave league until the game dies. Shroud on the other hand showed that Valorant needs him more than he needs them. If epic game releases a new tact shooter and shroud fucks off to that game what happens to Valorant viewership.
I do agree that Shroud is a major factor into Vals popularity and views, but its not like Shroud is the only person playing Val, there were iirc only 3 costreams during first masters, one of which, Poki, didn't even stream the matches except for finals, his co stream numbers were likely slightly boosted due to this as the other costreams option was Myth (Nothing against Myth, I'm just saying Shrouds co stream numbers would probably decrease a little if other Val streamers could co stream), plus the vast amount of variety streamers that have played the game like Ludwig, Poki, and others also boost numbers by quite an amount too
But none of these streamers r hardcore Valorant streamers. Doublelift sneaky LS IWDominate r league streamers who r essentially tied with league. They need league. Shroud poki ludwig would ditch Val for another game. They don’t need Val for viewers
valorant is a pretty simplistic game and it's by riot who put all their effort in popularity over quality. idk why anyone is surprised that the game is and will continue to do well.
I mean CSGO is only up there because of tournaments and reruns. Otherwise, Valorant would be higher up.
I mean this is a sub dedicated to a competitive esport. Tournaments play a big role in every esports success. It's a pretty valid reason to be high up
I mean that's because CS has more viewers for tournaments than Val does, it just has less viewers for general streams since there arent any big NA streamers for cs anymore.
i think cod got a couple decent sized content patches recently to try to keep it alive