Riot Games today is reporting viewership numbers from the first Valorant international tournament as well as revealing that it is taking the first-person shooter game to mobile. The Sentinels-Fnatic grand finals of the recently concluded Valorant Champions Tour major in Iceland earned an average viewership of more than 800K people, according to data analyzed by Stream Hatchet.
That figure was across multiple streams of the same match, as Riot both aired the event on the official Valorant channels on Twitch and YouTube, while also employing a co-streaming strategy that is called “Watch Parties.” These were streams run by individual content creators who partnered with Riot to air the final on their own channel, in a bid to let viewers find a broadcast that suited them. Riot did not break down the viewership by channel, only reporting the 800K AMA figure, along with that the event had more than 1M peak concurrent viewers.
Valorant Esports Global Strategy Lead Kasra Jafroodi told SBJ/TEO: “Even going back to when we started investing in Valorant Esports, we had high expectations and ambitions to create a global esport and be the best in the first-person shooter genre. We had high expectations going into this event because it had a lot of storylines and was the first international event, and the results have been incredible.” Jafroodi said that Riot was also pleased with its sponsor activation execution that included having a Red Bull fridge in view during coaches’ interviews among other moves.
Meanwhile, this week marks the one-year anniversary of the original release of Valorant last year in the early stages of the pandemic – and to mark the occasion, Riot has confirmed it is taking Valorant to mobile and also reported that more than 14 million people play Valorant every month. Currently, the game is only available to play on high-level personal computers. Rival publisher Activision Blizzard has generated hundreds of millions of new downloads of Call of Duty by taking that game to mobile, and now Riot Games wants to do the same. No release date was announced for the mobile version.
(Photo : NoypiGeeks)
