In celebration of the one-year anniversary of Valorant, Riot Games has announced some exciting news, including a monthly player count of over 14 million and future plans for Valorant Mobile. Exactly one year ago, June 2, 2020, Riot released Valorant. Since then, the game has been treated to regular patches and updates, some of which even included new game modes like Replication.
While Valorant is certainly standing on its own two feet, Riot is best known for its popular MOBA League of Legends. Through League of Legends, Riot became one of the wealthiest, most well-known independent companies in gaming. More than 11 years after the game’s initial release, it is still updated often and continuously receives new content, including reworks of stale, older champions. In recent years, Riot has made moves to expand its brand. In addition to Valorant, Riot released Teamfight Tactics and Legends of Runeterra in the past couple years. There are also plans for a Netflix series and a story-based, single-player game this year. All of these are based on League of Legends.
So far, Valorant is the only other unique IP Riot has under its belt, and its performance is more than promising. As of its one-year anniversary, the game attracts more than 14 million players every month, according to a press release from Riot. It’s also estimated that about 500 million games of Valorant have been played in just the first year. This has left plenty of room for Valorant eSports teams to emerge, mainly through the Valorant Champions Tour (VCT). VCT: Masters Stage 2 just wrapped up last week in Iceland, and Riot was paying very close attention to its viewership.
However, all of these number pale in comparison to Valorant’s true potential in the mobile market. Games like Among Us, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and Call of Duty have been downloaded hundreds of millions, even billions of times. Riot clearly recognizes this, as earlier this year, League of Legends: Wild Rift found itself on mobile devices. According to Riot, Valorant Mobile is also in the works. This comes as an effort to “offer the same competitive VALORANT experience to even more global players,” according to Anna Donlon, Executive Producer of the game. However, until the release of Valorant Mobile, the PC game still has plenty of upcoming content, including new competitive seasons and events.
This is one of the first true glimpses the gaming community has had into the success of Valorant. With this new knowledge, and the fact that a Valorant game tends to last at least 30 minutes, a lowball estimate of how many hours-worth of games have been played is about 250 million. Valorant is still young, and it has plenty of issues that still need to be fixed, especially when it comes to managing the game’s community, but the game’s initial success is a sign of great things to come.