The tactical shooter Valorant may have already shot its load in the closed beta. While the shooter dominated the streaming platform Twitch in April, the game remains rather quiet now at its release. Although Valorant enters at place 5 of the most watched games, the big excitement is missing.
How popular Valorant was at its peak: In April 2020, the dominance of Valorant on Twitch was simply absurd. The title was watched for 344 million hours in April. The game had an average of 480,000 viewers, with a peak of 1.7 million people watching simultaneously.
That was in all categories, double or even triple the number of people compared to the second largest game of the month, League of Legends.
The hype lasted about 6 weeks. On May 20, we already wrote on MeinMMO: The big hype around Valorant is over.
This is how Valorant performs on Twitch at release
This is how popular Valorant is now: Valorant officially released on June 2. The numbers in the last 3 days are strong, but much lower than during the peak times.
| Metric | April | Last 3 Days |
| Average Viewers | 479,209 | 118,703 |
| Peak Viewers | 1,728,977 | 250,805 |
| Hours Watched | Rank 1 | Rank 5 |
| Average Viewers per Channel | 75.09 | 59.03 |
Currently, the game ranks 5th in the last 3 days behind titles like LoL, Fortnite, and GTA 5. Valorant is freshly released and should actually be at full strength, while the other top games have relatively little going on.
2 of the top streamers are skipping Valorant right now
Who is streaming this? In the last few days, some big names were streaming Valorant. These include Myth, TimTheTatman, and Pokimane, who are among the top 10 on Twitch. However, some of the most successful streamers from the Valorant beta are missing, such as the Swede Anomaly (header image) or summit1g:
- Summit1g even explicitly said “Nah” to Valorant, but then went silent, as is his style. He preferred to be in GTA 5 and Sea of Thieves. In March, summit1g had said that Valorant would be 10 times better than Overwatch.
- The always-masked Swede Anomaly has spent more time in CS:GO over the past few days than in the game where he was incredibly successful.
The gold rush is over
What is the reason for this? The great success of Valorant in the beta was due to players having to watch to receive Twitch Drops and thereby gain access to the Valorant beta. They could only play Valorant by watching a streamer and were lucky enough to obtain a Twitch Drop. This led to a real gold rush.
The beta access was also limited. Not everyone who wanted to play could do so. Anyone who wanted to engage with Valorant during the closed beta had to watch on Twitch.
Now anyone can play the free-to-play shooter themselves and it’s not as exciting to watch from the outside anymore.
In addition, some streamers seem to have gotten bored with Valorant. Valorant is considered a game that is very similar to CS:GO. Both Anomaly and summit1g have spent thousands of hours playing CS:GO, so saturation can occur quickly until new content arrives.
Valorant is currently also missing some features that many players are waiting for: For example, the ranked mode is currently disabled.
We conducted a big interview with the game director at the release of Valorant. It touched on how Riot Games used the Twitch platform to promote Valorant.
The game director said they didn’t want to destroy Twitch. That must have happened on the side. Actually, Riot Games just wanted to show the new game to as many people as possible.
