Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
It is official, undoubtedly the most anticipated game of the year VALORANT is coming out for free on June 2nd! Riot games announced on Thursday that the team-based, first person tactical shooter will launch sooner than expected.
Anna Donlon, executive producer of VALORANT at Riot Games shared:
“Our goal has always been to bring VALORANT to as much of the world as soon as possible, so we’re hyped to be able to do so on June 2nd. The team looks forward to starting our decades-long commitment to servicing the global VALORANT community. This is just the beginning of our journey together.”
The closed beta, which opened in early April, will go offline on May 28th for maintenance, enabling developers to prepare the game for launch and reset players accounts. Until then, there won’t be any new patches to the beta.
For VALORANT’s official release, players can look forward to a new agent, new map and beta game mode, along with new weapon skins and a battle pass. The game will be available for most regions across the world. On top of that, Riot plans to add more serves in major locations and improve the ones in South America and Eastern Europe.
Even though VALORANT is Riot’s first shot at the genre, it has already made a notable impact across gaming community. According to Donlon, the game has averaged nearly 3 million players daily during the closed beta. Not to mention several Twitch viewership records. When the closed beta went live on April 7th, VALORANT reached 1.7 million concurrent viewers, outperforming 2019 League of Legends World Championship and Fortnite’s “The End” event.
However, the record was not a result of pure interest of players, but rather the fact, that the only way to get into closed beta was through random Twitch drops. Many spent long hours watching selected VALORANT streams in hope to grab a drop.
The game is highly competitive and it’s clearly aiming for a professional scene. It is expected to even overshadow CS:GO, as both are very similar in gameplay. There already has been several announcements of pro players leaving CS:GO for VALORANT. Hopefully, the titles will be able to coexist and VALORANT will grow to bring more diversity to competitive scene.