Is Valorant Going Extinct in 2022?

Valorant got a great start, but did it live up to what gamers wanted?

The game has had many problems in its first year, but it seems to be going well now. The game has done well in esports, even though it is not enjoyable for casual gamers.

The esport that everyone will discuss in the year 2020 is Valorant. Before it came out, about 1.73 million people watched it on Twitch. We saw many professional players switch to the game, and content creators like Shroud said it would be more important than CSGO because it was less dangerous. But now that everyone has stopped talking about Valorant, we wonder if it is as big as it wanted to be. Or is it slowly going away?

Valorant’s Successful Launch

Riot Games did a lot of advertising for their new game, and fans quickly noticed that it was similar to CSGO, Overwatch, and Valorant. Counter-Strike has been approximately for more than 20 years. It began as a modification for Half-Life in 1999.

Counter-Strike became an actual game in 2000 and immediately became popular. Valorant borrows ideas from the game but makes them it is own. Instead of Ts and CTs, we have attackers, defenders, and agents instead of troops.

Simple game rules and visual language make Valorant easy to learn. The game is harder to master, though, because it has a lot of different skills.

Riot Games didn’t need top-notch hardware. Instead, they made it simple for PCs with less powerful hardware to run the game. ColdZera, who enjoyed the game and gave it high reviews initially, believes it will never be better than CSGO.

When Valorant came out, people didn’t like it.

Some of the biggest problems with the game that content creators, pro players, and regular people have had since it came out.

Riot’s Almost Constant Anti-Cheat

Riot’s anti-cheat software Vanguard was criticized for being too intrusive when it first came out. Even if you close the game, the anti-cheat can keep running in the background to watch other apps. When it first came out, Vanguard needed an alarming number of permissions. Some players said that Vanguard could prevent them from using their computer’s fan controllers or even apps that don’t help cheaters, like MSI Afterburner.

Map Design

When comparing Valorant’s maps to those seen in CSGO or other popular FPS games, it’s clear that they’re overcrowded. You put things all over the map and make it hard for attackers to get past enemy defences by giving the map a lot of crooked edges. A mapmaker said that the way the game’s map is made, which you can see below, is much more tiring.

Rocky Launch

Valorant came out earlier than expected, on June 2, 2020. Many players couldn’t buy the battle pass, and even after they unlocked the rewards, they couldn’t get them. Players were upset when there were problems with the servers, but Riot fixed them in just a few days.

System for Beauty Products

Cosmetics are utilized to gain money since Valorant is a free-to-play game. But players have been upset about the prices of skins in the game since some bundles of skins cost up to $90. Players haven’t liked the Night Market, and since they can’t re-roll, they have to deal with the fact that it’s completely random.

The Death of Valorant in South Korea

South Korea is a very important place for esports, but Riot didn’t take advantage of how popular Valorant was there. Many famous people have talked at length about this issue in the past, which can be explained by the following:

Locked Agents

Users like to play the game as any character they want because there are so many Internet cafes (PC bangs) in the country. Every character in Riot’s League of Legends is unlocked in these gaming cafes but not in Valorant. Players have to earn XP before they can use the agents. And each player has to do this, which is different from other games in Korea that use a shared client.

Vanguard

Riot’s anti-cheat mechanism for Vanguard does not integrate well with the customized café applications used to handle logins and playtime. This made café owners not want to use the game because it made their jobs harder and the anti-cheat could flag or shut down the apps used to run the café.

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Global Pandemic

When Valorant came out, the pandemic made fewer people want to play PC bang. The game was already not very popular in the country, making it even less so. Since lockdown rules are being relaxed worldwide, it’s unlikely that the game will become popular.

Viewership

Many people say that Valorant is not entertaining to watch. This could be because it’s hard to understand the agents and what they can do. A lot fewer people are watching Valorant now than before. Riot didn’t get to start things off because LAN events couldn’t happen as often because of the pandemic, but that’s about to change, as we’ll talk about later.

Is Valorant dying?

Using Twitch Tracker, we can see that about 77,000 people watched it in its first month, June 2020. Two months before the game came out, it reached a peak of 1.73 million viewers, almost as high as the League of Legends World record of 1.75 million viewers in 2020.

Many people who create content start with the number 1.73 million, which is wrong. The hype made a lot of people money, and most of the people who watched streams at the time did so to try to get a beta key.

As of January 2021, about 60,000 people care about it, down from about 77,000 when it first came out. The number of players goes up a little when a new agent or map comes out, but it stays around 55,000 most of the time, which isn’t bad.

People still watch it because it is still one of the most-watched games on Twitch. But Summit1G and Shroud are right when they say Valorant is not a good game for people who want to watch.

Riot intends to sustain Valorant for at least 10 years and make it a long-lasting esports game, so the game might still be a fantastic sport. While it does not get as much attention as League of Legends, DOTA 2, or CSGO, it may help beginners get started in esports.

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