With many esports professionals transitioning to Valorant from other FPS titles, does this mark its promise as an esport? By Brandon Scherhaufer.
Unless you’ve been living under a secret virtual gaming world rock, you are probably aware that Valorant is finally out and available for everyone. No more ‘24/7 key drop’ streams clogging the Twitch home page and no more players leaving their favorite Twitch streams running overnight, ripe enough to be shown advertisements multiple times while the majority of viewers were asleep.
Despite this aggressive marketing campaign, it was effective. Within the first month of Valorant’s beta phase, it garnered the attention and desire of the entire gaming community with Twitch viewership numbers reaching over 300 million towards early April. With so many eyes on this new competitive FPS game, it begged this question for many fans:
Will Valorant become the next big esport?
To answer this question, we must look at the reactions of esports teams, fans, and players to the game. Even before Valorant was released in Closed Beta, there were teams and players adding ‘Professional Valorant Player’ to their Twitter Bios. While many were skeptical about someone claiming to be a “Pro” in a game that wasn’t even released yet, the early success of the game has suggested that the title will not only have its own esports circuit, but that it will be highly competitive.
For many esports teams, Riot’s leap into the FPS genre was seen as a new and fresh opportunity. Given that Riot created arguably one of the greatest esports games of all time — League of Legends — it is not unthinkable to assume that they would have esports and the mechanics of the ecosystem in mind when it came to Valorant’s game design, patch notes and overall development.
Considering Riot Games’ history in esports, it is a safe bet for established organizations to try and break into the scene as early as possible. For team and organisation CEOs, Valorant is an opportunity to stand out in the early stages of a game that will (hopefully) have a long lifespan and help them further their brand’s awareness. It already seems like the sky is the limit for Valorant’s esports scene and teams are already beginning to announce big name signings: for example, G2 signed former world champion M1xwell just last week.
While there have only been a few major Valorant tournaments thus far, the competition has been fierce, and interestingly, the winners have been astoundingly favored towards ex CS:GO professionals. In the Twitch Rivals tournament for example, almost all of the North American finalists in the tournament were former CS:GO pros, including Brax, Wardell and Skadoodle, with the exception of popular Fortnite streamer, Myth.
Does the early success of ex Counter-Strike professionals speak to the successes of Valorant or the lack of breakthrough opportunity in other FPS esports?
While we surely can’t answer that question yet, we can however analyze the professional scene in CS and assess how difficult it is to break into the scene and join a Tier 1 organization. A tweet by CS:GO pro player Yayster — “there’s no organizations looking to invest in a non-established CS team” — is a testament to this. Later in his tweet, Yayster explains that many of the Counter Strike professional players switching to Valorant are not making this change in order to be dominant in a smaller, less competitive esports scene, but rather out of financial necessity, in order to have a greater chance of possibly being picked up by a Top Tier organization.
Yayster goes on to describe the road for North American pros to make it into competitive leagues without being partnered with an organization. He laments the months and months of team building that needs to take place in order to be able to compete against the partnered teams in major tournaments. With so much grinding necessary to put a roster together that will already be at a disadvantage against partnered teams with greater resources, Yayster understands why many current CS:GO pros are looking for new opportunities in Valorant. While Valorant isn’t the same game as CS:GO and the first few weeks of tournaments have shown that the skills and game knowledge required to be great at Valorant has plenty of overlap with Counter Strike. Successful CS pros such as Brax, Skadoodle and the others aforementioned have all piloted teams to victory in Valorant thus far, providing further evidence of this overlap between the two games. With big names such as C9, TSM, Immortals, and SKT T1 already setting up rosters, it seems highly likely that many other teams will soon follow.
In the months and years to come, fans of Valorant esports will have to wait and see if these CS ex-pros will continue to dominate the scene, or if Valorant players without a professional FPS history will be able to surpass some of these veterans. As a fan of Valorant as a game and an esport, I am eager and intrigued to see the development of the scene in the future, as it increases in popularity and garners more new players.
