The shooter Valorant is a money sink. 100 Thieves’ e-sports boss, Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag, looked up during a Twitch stream how much money he has put into the supposedly free game, and he had a hard time accepting it. Many of his fans feel the same way.
How much is being spent on Valorant?
- Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag showed in a Twitch stream that he has spent $10,389.96 on Valorant – that’s about €9,600.
- He says checking that number was the “worst idea he ever had.”
- Then he says he thinks he might throw up and makes gagging noises. Ultimately, he asks his Twitch chat if they could send him 100 subs, about €250.
“This is very disheartening for me”
Is he the only one? No, it is clear on Twitter: Other players, many of whom are not as wealthy as the e-sports boss and former pro Nadeshot, have spent between $5,000 and $15,000 on Valorant.
The pro player Leaf says he has wasted about $10,800 over the years, but it’s not bragging; it’s very disheartening to look back on it.
Are people satisfied with their spending? No, people are posting their spending on Twitter and making fun of themselves for how much money they’ve put into Valorant when they sum it all up.
The problem seems to be that Valorant has been on the market for about 4 years, skins in the game are very expensive, and players don’t even realize how much money adds up because you always transfer “relatively small amounts” at once. We see with Nadeshot that he repeatedly invests $100 or $200 to top up his in-game balance.
Where can you see how much money you have spent on Valorant? You can see that on the official Valorant support page if you check your purchase history in the bottom right. You just need to be logged in with your account.
Even “good microtransactions” can be really expensive
What’s behind that: This is interesting because Valorant is actually considered one of the games that behave exemplary with microtransactions, offering purely cosmetic skins. Loot boxes or gacha games are more notorious.
But in a universally celebrated game like Valorant, the gamer logic prevails: “Well, if I’m playing it this much anyway, I might as well buy a skin every now and then, I got the game for free” – but what that adds up to over 4 years is shocking.
Given the amounts, it’s clear why free-to-play games invest so much time and resources into designing their skins, at the expense of the game’s quality and other content. A game that has turned away from this is DOTA 2. The MOBA has decided to focus more on quality again: Steam giant Valve is putting a lot of work into DOTA 2: fundamentally changing all 124 heroes
