Is valorant dead yet? What do the numbers look like now compared to when the hype was at its peak? Will the player base continue to decrease? Find out here!
Valorant is a free-to-play first-person shooter brought to us by Riot Games that has similar characteristics of CSGO, Overwatch and other popular first-person shooters. The aim mechanics are similar to CSGO which is the best in the industry.
Unlike a typical FPS game, you will have to play with different unique characters which will have special abilities respective to them only. This makes the game tactically better and gives a variety of new strategies to play with. Basically, aim is important but efficient usage of characters can out maneuver aim.
Valorant Player Count
When Valorant got released to the whole world, the player base was at its peak boasting a player count of 3 million daily (claimed by the developer Riot Games). The hype was real as many thought it to be the next big thing which could possibly compete against the likes of Rainbow Six Siege and Counter Strike which has been dominating the tactical first person genre for over a decade.
As the time passed, the player count certainly did not rise. It rather continued on a downward spiral. We cannot give you the exact numbers now as Riot Games have not released it publicly yet, but we can speculate the player base by looking at the twitch viewership numbers.
Valorant Twitch Streams
Are Valorant streams dead? Valorant currently ranks top 10 in Twitch in terms of live viewers. We can check and deduce whether players are increasing or decreasing based on peak viewers in the past few months through this graph above. As you can see, Valorant spiked with its first release but then it has reduced significantly.
This reduction is certainly to be wary of but when you compare it with other popular games in the same genre like CSGO, it is doing quite well. The worrisome thing for Valorant is whether this downward spiral will continue.
The source of these graphs are Twitch Tracker.
Valorant is not as exciting?
Valorant certainly might seem not as exciting to most players because they have not introduced something new. They have simply copied the already existing concepts from games and merged it to make it look like a completely new exciting game. Saying copy might be harsh but they have not brought something new to the table yet. The competitive FPS genre remains the same with the addition of Valorant.
Does it have potential?
It certainly has lots of potential as Valorant currently has not gone into hosting tournaments which brings players and fanbase together to support their favourite teams. One of the main reasons CSGO has stayed relevant is due to large amounts of tournaments in the Esports industry. It could potentially become the CSGO killer as professional players from CSGO like Hiko have switched to playing Valorant professionally.
Why is Valorant losing popularity?
The anti cheat system called Vanguard might make people wary of installing the game because of its Kernel level (Ring-0) access. What it means is that Riot Games will have full access to your PC if they wish it. When you turn on your PC, Vanguard immediately opens up after the bootloader. Ideally, this would stop or disable any insecure drivers that can be exploited by cheaters but it also means that if the anti-cheat is exploited, hackers can have access to your entire system.
To top it off, Tencent are the owners of this Vanguard application who have a bad reputation for illegal data leaks. This certainly puts many users off which is certainly one of the main reasons players are keeping away from this game.
See this video from Engadget on this issue!
Conclusion
So is valorant really a dead game? No, certainly not. But, the numbers don’t look encouraging for Riot Games unless they do something about it. The game is still in its initial phases making their potential high if they can fulfill their promises.
Further Reading
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- Best Gaming and Work Laptop
- Laptop vs Console: Which is better for gaming?
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