Today, on Friday, April 3rd, the next big thing on Twitch is set to be revealed. It is the team shooter Valorant from Riot Games: Everything seems to be planned for it to be the next hype after Fortnite and CoD Warzone and the plan is working.
This is clearly the plan: Everything indicates that Riot Games plans to make its new team shooter Valorant the “next big hype game.” They seem to have worked undercover for the past few weeks to prepare everything to set this avalanche in motion, which is set to start today.
This is planned for Valorant: Tonight at 7 PM our time, Valorant will debut on Twitch with 5 pre-recorded matches featuring some of the biggest Twitch streamers in the world.
This will happen at “Twitch Rivals,” the streaming platform’s own hype format.
3 of the 10 biggest Twitch streamers in the world invited
You can see from the names of the 50 invited streamers what plan Riot Games is pursuing and which target audience they want to reach with Valorant:
- Summit1G (No. 3 on Twitch) is an established and respected Twitch streamer who originally comes from CS:GO and enjoys high regard in the shooter community.
- TimTheTatman (No. 4 on Twitch) and DrLupo (No. 8 on Twitch) are streamers from Ninja’s circle, both of whom are successful in Fortnite but also regularly stream other games
- Gotaga is there – he is No. 1 in France
- The Swedish Forsen is a cult streamer on Twitch who brings his own fan base
- Dizzy was the star in Apex Legends when the game exploded in February 2019, he crushed everything in the first weeks and practically won every tournament
- HighDistortion and Cloakzy are performance-oriented streamers from Fortnite and other shooters
Who is missing from the big names? The top streamers who are missing are Tfue, Myth, and Dakotaz – all three are clearly associated with Fortnite. This target audience is probably not what Riot Games intends to reach or they did not fit into the picture for other reasons.
Surprisingly, DrDisrespect is missing – one might have expected him at the event as a “shooter streamer.”
Viewers can win beta access to Valorant
This is the special thing: To encourage even more people to watch, there will be Twitch Drops at the event tonight.
Those who have linked their Riot account with Twitch have the chance to win access to the closed beta.
Twitch is key to success for multiplayer shooters
Why is Twitch so important? For several years, Twitch has been the key for online shooters to really take off and create hype:
- This modern trend started in 2016 relatively slowly with H1Z1: King of the Kill. The battle royale was raw and buggy, but incredibly entertaining and successful
- In 2017, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was the game of the hour that suddenly dominated Twitch – making DrDisrespect a star back then
- In 2018, Fortnite took the top position and triggered a massive hype – many current Twitch stars owe their high follower numbers to the battle royale shooter
These 3 games grew more or less “organically” and the hype arose on Twitch. The developers of PUBG once explained how they managed to create hype without a big budget .
- By 2019, this “innocent time” was over. EA launched Apex Legends planned and with a reportedly high budget for streamers on the platform and was able to remain strong for at least a few weeks. Reports suggest that Ninja allegedly received $1 million at that time. The streamer shroud also seemed to be part of this plan, with “sponsored streams” at the release to conquer the platform.
In 2020, “Valorant” is expected to follow in the list if everything goes as Riot Games envisions and plans. However, the game must also convince, be readable for the viewer, and be fun. Whether that is the case will be clear tonight at 7 PM.
For streamers, Valorant is an opportunity to be part of the “next big thing” from the very beginning and perhaps reach a new level. Recently, a Fortnite pro and Twitch streamer ended his career in Fortnite to start fresh with Valorant.
Valorant has nearly 1 million viewers on Twitch
Update April 3rd, 8:02 PM: Does Riot’s plan work? Yes, it works. One can already say that. Just before 8 PM, Valorant was by far the strongest category on Twitch.
Worldwide, the new shooter from Riot Games attracted nearly 1 million viewers who wanted to see the game. In second place was League of Legends with about 250,000 viewers.
The majority of viewers are tuning in from the following 7 Twitch channels:
- TimTheTatman: 103k
- summit1g: 90k
- Lirik: 45k
- The Twitch Rivals channel itself: 40k
- ibai (Spanish): 32k
- Gotaga (French): 30k
- Pokimane: 30k
The largest German channel is the Twitch streamer Trymacs with nearly 13k.
MeinMMO editor Leya Jankowski had the opportunity to try out Valorant and shares her impressions here.
