The closed beta phase of Riot’s FPS title VALORANT has come to a conclusion on the night of May 28, with the servers shutting down temporarily for a few days till the official release. The final release date of VALORANT is scheduled to be on June 2nd, as announced by Riot.
During only its closed beta, the game has accomplished much more than most other titles would hope to achieve in a lifetime. Riot has confirmed that the competitive shooter has accumulated over 470 million hours watched by its fans on Twitch and a Korean streaming platform AfreecaTV. Phwoar in this short period of time.
The reason for this humongous number of hours watched lies primarily behind the method Riot used to distribute the beta keys for the game. To put it simply, Riot made it compulsory for fans to watch the game for a certain time period on Twitch in order to be eligible for a beta key drop. This further gave rise to a lot of controversies, since streamers could be seen abusing the mechanic to play VODs of streams while luring people by tilting their streams as ‘Drops enabled’. However, this was later addressed by Twitch and such streams were prohibited.
Riot also announced that VALORANT saw an average of about 3 Million players logging daily into the game, which is certainly a massive number, especially considering the fact that a vast number of people didn’t even get access to the beta. It’s only expected that the number will increase after the official launch, and that too by a margin.
Riot devs have promised that the official release of VALORANT on June 2 is expected to bring a new agent, a new map, new servers and several improvements to the game including minor fixes to major performance improvements.
Fans are sure to be staying tuned till the much anticipated final release date of the game arrives, and we’ll be waiting to see how many more records is this game set to break.
