As many had speculated earlier, the closed beta release of VALORANT has indeed taken a toll on the player base of its rival, CSGO. Previous month’s data on Steam Charts show that the player counts of CSGO have taken a sudden detour from the steady increase it was experiencing since several months.
The numbers reveal that the average player count of the first-person shooter by Valve has dramatically decreased from 857,604 in April to 768,795 in May, a difference of almost 100,000 players and that too, under a month.
While the numbers are quite dramatic, the incident is however, unsurprising. With all the promises that VALORANT had handed out and with all the features it has managed to deliver even before its official release, it was bound to attract a good number of CSGO players to itself.
Two of the prime features which CSGO lacked at but were in high demand among the fans were 128-tick servers and a better anti-cheat engine. VALORANT delivered both of these, gaining the attention of the gaming community worldwide. Besides these, Riot has made sure that their competitive shooter runs on even decade old PCs, further increasing its popularity among gamers who don’t want to invest heavily on a rig.
It goes without saying the closed beta phase of Riot’s shooter was a groundbreaking success in itself, with the game amassing a daily player average of about a whopping 3,000,000 players. CSGO, on the other hand, reaches about a concurrent player peak of 1.2 million players everyday.
Most importantly, it all happened when VALORANT was in its closed beta stage when only a limited number of players had access to the beta key drops. With VALORANT officially launching worldwide on June 2, these numbers can only be expected to increase a lot further.
