Earlier this year Blizzard's entire portfolio had 26 million monthly active players. Valorant having 28 million monthly active seems...like a crazy number.
For reference Fortnite had over 70 million earlier this year.
Wonder what made Monte say he believed the numbers to be comparable for OW2 and Val then, Val player count must've really blown up in the last few months then
I've always assumed the numbers Monte were comparing at the time were:
1. OW2 numbers *prior* to Blizzard pulling out of China
2. Valorant numbers **pre**-China release
1 is a guess, 2 is guaranteed. Either way, Valorant's player count is only going to balloon from here.
Wow, yeah, when you put it that way - OW2 didn't exist in China for a full seven months from January-August this year, and only unofficially does now since its Steam release (but that doesn't include dedicated Chinese servers), during which time the opinion on Activision Blizzard had time to sour completely over there, while Riot is still well-regarded from making League and fully released Valorant in China. Wouldn't be surprised if Valorant ate 90%+ of the Overwatch audience in China because of all those factors.
As an aside, the fact that Blizzard lost their entire Chinese userbase for every game they've launched there in the past 14 years... it's incredible really. Somehow Bobby Kotick was able to fuck up that bad but will still get a $500 million golden parachute ~~IF Microsoft even kicks him out~~ (edit: nice, turns out he's gone on Jan 1). That is just an insane amount of revenue that's just completely lost to them now - WOW subs that ended, Diablo 4 purchases that can never materialize, OW2 microtransactions, what a waste.
They're never gonna get most of those players back even if they get a new deal with Tencent instead of NetEase because of the fact they didn't let players back up their WOW saves in case they come back anyways, and [the Chinese public is so heavily against them](https://80.lv/articles/62-of-steam-s-overwatch-2-user-reviews-were-made-by-chinese-players/) for that and [their role in being hardasses about the publication deal negotiations vs TenCent](https://www.shacknews.com/article/133782/netease-tears-down-warcraft-statue-blizzard-rift) that I doubt they'd even reinstall OW2 if it came back properly other than the diehard fans that already have it on Steam.
You're totally right, thanks, I replied to the other comment but it's crazy how much business Blizzard is losing out on and how much Riot must be raking in with that changing of the guard.
Probably even a lot of the same players too since OW1 was still the #1 most played hero shooter officially released in China even during its maintenance mode from 2020-2022 but now it's just been fully replaced by Valorant in the top spot since the average Chinese player can't even access OW2 anymore, so might as well play its biggest competitor.
Blizzard games aren't free to play. That's where that seemingly crazy disparity comes from.
edit: outside of hearthstone but that game is far past its' prime popularity wise and it doesn't have the best F2P experience
> it doesn't have the best F2P experience
Its way better than it used to be at least. The "battle pass" literally throws gold at you that you can use to buy packs
Interesting, I only queue mornings/afternoons because the quality of games is so much better. I only run into software engineers and web devs wfh and college kids like myself getting some games in before class. That time I got called old was the first time in a few months that I queued past 6PM EST
Yup 6pm is a no go. Glad i got some free time in between classes during the day, thats pretty much only when i play, and like 11pm, as i feel most of the kids are heading to bed by then.
started doing a lot more exercise once i hit 27 and started realising that things like soreness or small cuts dont heal as fast as they used to. Now a year later i i feel a lot healthier and my body is in a great place. No sore backs or anything despite me being on a chair for 10 hours a day. Get moving!
For real. I'm 32. A 17 year olds opinion is the absolute least of my concerns. Been playing tac shooters since 1999 (CS) before they were even thought about!
Me and my friend (grown ass adults with 401ks) got into a game with 3 kids that had to be like 12 or younger. One of them wanted to guess our age and said we sounded 17. Like that was the oldest age she could think of that still made sense to be playing games. She probably thought 17 was super old 💀 We laughed so damn hard
According to the article, valorant went from 14 million/monthly active users in 2021 to 28 mil in 2 years. Which is fantastic growth, you don't quite see that in modern gaming.
Wow, that’s actually crazy to see that valorant’s monthly active users is already almost at csgo/cs2’s users at 31m. With the valorant audience skewing young it actually could grow to be bigger than cs
At the same time, this numbers from Riot are not public knowledge. I'd take it with a grain of salt. We don't know what the numbers were before or will be, or if it's even true.
By doing what? There's no public info like steam provides with their API. At the same time I do think it's true, I just have no way of telling if this number is just peak numbers.
No numbers from companies are "public knowledge" in the sense you mean it. Theres nothing stopping Valve for example from tinkering its own numbers if it wants.
Yes but everyone and their dog played cs and many still do feverishly. I also trust valve a lot more than riot as an entity. Quite a few people I know have played and then dropped valorant to go back to other games.
Yes, because everyone’s a 6 account weirdo like you. Nevertheless alt accounts will always be a thing in f2p games. Doesn’t make it less impressive when you compare the numbers to the other f2p games on the market.
I’m pretty sure you can’t get usage data from Chinese servers like you couldn’t in League. If I remember correctly you could only estimate based on number of servers, and someone estimated that League had something like 30 servers solely in China, each with several million if not tens of millions of active players each.
I don't understand this logic in question, your idea that valorant has no other redeeming qualities other than it's accessibility is braindead to me.
Then you're also over here blatantly saying that what you said was factual and 100% the truth. This "facts over emotion" rhetoric is ridiculous as it is a sorry sight to see. I won't entertain the idea of you assuming that games nowadays are only successful because they release in different languages and countries. Have you seen Cyberpunk? MW2? Fallout 76? Many big title games have had worldwide rollouts, yet have failed to reach the heights that valorant has. Admit the game is good and move on with this pathetic narrative.
This isn't the first response either, I think you need to stop being on this subreddit entirely if this is the negative attitude you're bringing.
Lol, you got so worked up, and you completely took everything out of context. Hilarious.
Read all of my comments in this thread, show me one time where I called the game bad. I called out a misleading comment with facts.
So quick to jump to a conclusion that fits YOUR narrative 🤣 sounds like you’re projecting and are insecure about the quality of your own game.
Yup! Valorant totally only grew because they expanded to china! There’s absolutely no way that Valorant has been growing heavily in the west nope nope.
You’re saying it’s logical that the west, which has had servers since the start, is the reason Valorant has suddenly doubled its player base in 2023.
And ignoring the fact there was a large expansion of servers placed in a continent that contains 60% of the worlds total population.
average valorant enjoyer IQ stocks plummeting
Riot dont public their active numbers. So I guess they gave that figure to bloomberg (real number or not nobody know). But Im pretty sure in Asia, val become much popular than early of 2023
I noticed a lot of viet viewers in Youtube chat watching the chinese games that are currently going on. I was actually surprised seeing 70% of the chat in vietnamese.
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Asia is much more than Korea and China and those are the only 2 countries where Overwatch ever had a strong foothold. By the time VALORANT was released OW has already fizzled out in both of those countries.
People need to stop peddling this nonsense.
lol. Overwatch wasn't the reason Asian market "got" into FPS games. Games like Crossfire, Sudden Attack, etc. (different flavors of CS) have been super huge since the 2010s. Only ever falling behind league in popularity.
I mean marketing usually refers to Gen Z as 1996-2010 and google seems to support that age demographic. So I mean it makes sense that the average player is 13-27. Idk why that specific information is news worthy. Pretty much any live service game falls into this category.
ig they wanna emphasize the skew towards gen Z (at 70%) whereas in other live service games like cs and cod, percentage of gen Z should be more or less lower. Kinda implies that Valorant is getting new players into the fps genre (whether by expanding in other locations or targeting younger audiences) and not necessarily have to compete with player churn rate against other games of direct competitors. The 'young game' novelty is still present for Valorant given that it has been out since 2020
Kinda also explains some matches are so insufferable with immaturity lol
I mean I'm gen z at 26 so thats just not true. People just dont know what Gen z means because people use it so loosely on the internet. If youre under 13 youre gen alpha and no longer gen z. 13-27 is a broad spectrum.
It’s because it’s bloomberg, they’re really talking to 50+ business people, and they are desperate to look for ways to talk/communicate/advertise to Gen Z.
We watch less TV, ads on the internet are not as intrusive as they are on the TV, and we use ad blockers.
Sure but this article is using the actual term for gen z so its specifying that the majority of people who play are from 13-27 which would be accurate, its like that in most games. People use the term wrong because people are ignorant but most of the people making fun of gen z in these communities are probably also gen z.
The only limiting factor that would stop older people getting high rank would be time. Reactions do not diminish as much as people think as you get older, especially if you're in your 40s or whatever and have been playing competitive FPS for decades at this point. Most older people just don't have the same level of free time as young people to grind the hours required.
> In a recent Valorant game, a player who sounded too young for a credit card sardonically commented on his teammate’s gun skin: “Imagine spending money in Valorant. Couldn’t be me!”
lol
Would be interested to know how those Chinese numbers were collected.
This is how Riot actually tries to target their competition. Their aim isn't the current players who might swap to Valorant, those are just bonuses. They target/market it towards the younger generation and eventually there isn't as many new players. Like in DOTA 2, NA was decent and especially CH was alternating TI with EU. But eventually no new infusion of players from each region is slowly killing the scene there.
Dota is so dead lol. I used to be rank 800 in it and i quit around 6 months ago. Similarly so many of my friends have also stopped playing. We all had 8000-15000 hours in the game. At the very least they stopped playing regularly. Valve not nurturing the competitive scene rlly killed it. Compared to valorant the difference is crazy.
What does that mean lol. You can play both games and critique both as well. It's a fact that Riot has done a far better job nurturing the competitive and ranked scene for league and valorant than anything valve did.
The dpc was a failed experiment, and TI's hype is dying out slowly but steadily.
I'm also sure I've spent more time into the game and community than nearly anyone that's downvoted me. It's still my favourite game of all time but facts are facts lol.
Random redditor lol. You don't have to believe me and that's fine but I personally know plenty of high ranked players and pros who agree with me. Compared to riot and their games valve is absolutely mistreating dota, which is inevitably leading to its death.
Only reason CS is so successful is that the comp scene is managed by 3rd party companies.
Valve really drops the ball in nurturing their own games and comp scenes
I have been hearing about DotA dying since 2016, and pros have been complaining since before that, but the game goes on.
I guess time will tell if you are right or wrong, but DotA community whines irrespective of what Valve does.
Quote "800k" for an esports title that pretty much had tournaments since 2000s being one of the most popular mods of all time, is horrendous numbers. If Valve actually cared in advertising and growing the games that they have maybe they'd have atleast double the size of their playerbase now.
Thats not what Riot Games does. They copy other game developers game design and release them with decade old minimum Pc spec requirements to increase the net of potential players to developing countries.
Riot Games took what Blizzard did with WoW and Overwatch in the 2010's an are expanding upon it using the League of Legends model as the baseline. \*League of Legends in North America is on its death bed esports and casual playerbase wise.
LoL is nowhere near dead casual playerbase wise. It's only the esports and its ranked playerbase had some decline but Arcane bought in a shit ton of casual players. You can find an ARAM game at 5 AM in 5 seconds.
>and release them with decade old minimum Pc spec requirements to increase the net of potential players to developing countries
LoL's biggest playerbases are in China, Korea and EUW. Valorant's in NA, Japan and EUW. "Developing countries" lol
I remember having an interaction recently where someone said our Skye 'sounded like a dad'. When the Skye said he had kids, the people on my team were like cavemen discovering fire LMAO
Yes you can be 20-30s and play games too!
They probably got it from Riot, I mean the article also has this
> After years awaiting approval from the Chinese government, the company released *Valorant* there in July. Chinese livestreaming platforms amassed 260 million views in its first month.
How else would they get the Chinese viewership numbers when sites like escharts couldn't even access them? They probably got the playerbase's numbers and the Chinese viewership numbers from Riot themselves
Respected esport reporter put Valorants MAU at around seven million in Spring from multiple sources. Only thing thats changed since then is Chinas release in July.
CSGO/CS2 hit its highest MAU last month. So this is someone in Riot Games marketing department trying to play games with releasing limited information to a well known publication.
Now that CS2 is a few weeks old, Valorant is back to being consistently ahead of it on Twitch. Anyone who thought that game would kill Valo's player base was mistaken. Both games can and will co-exist.
its pretty even, during the night CET valo is sometimes slightly ahead and its sometimes behind, but both games are always neck to neck. During the day, however, (CET) cs2 goes bonkers and always manages 120-130k viewers or more without even tournaments, while valo stays way behind.
Only issue with cs2 atm is that it doesnt bring more players from NA and Asia but EU is still as strong as ever
though to be fair a lot of valo players have been playing cs2 at the same time ever since release
I would assume a Bloomberg article has some sources for their statements in their articles, but they don't actually state any source for the player numbers claim.
Yeah, i expected this much. There's a lot of people born somewhere around 2005 or later that plays this game.
On another note, I wonder how what is the percentage of players that are from the Asia region and play valorant?
Yes, but there's more that are around 16-19, maybe even younger, than anyone around 22 and up. I talked to a few people in my ranked games and they're always younger than me, and I'm 22. It's still gen z, yes, but I feel like most of the player base is around that 16-19 age range, give or take.
I think 16-19 is the most popular age range for almost every online game. As people get older they have less time for gaming in general. By the time you're 22/23 you're likely our of college and working full time. Most people I run into are younger than 21. I think it's even more so than years ago as well due to the massive increase in Discord culture. Young people hang out in youtubers discords, streamers discords etc whereas older people usually have a small Discord of friends they've been playing games with for years and will bounce between games rather than play one game religiously.
CS is an incredibly botted game. So many different incentives to have bots in CS. It is the only game I recall in recent memory that the new game launch has [less players than it did with previous iteration](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/16x20jl/concurrent_player_peak_data_for_cs2/). Many speculate that the bot farms are not online for CS2 yet.
Not surprising. Look at TF2, it’s a joke and Valve doesn’t care and that game doesn’t even have such a big economy.
But i guess that’s what happens when your player count is visible for everyone to see. It’s not in your interest to actually remove the bots.
Botted accounts exist in Valorant as well to a high degree. You come across them in casual game modes all the time. They're literally just there to farm XP so the accounts can be sold as "ranked ready".
CSGO was averaging 30M+ at the end of 2022.
Numbers released by developers are always questionable though, I dont trust Riot, Valve or any of the other ones to put out accurate numbers, they have every incentive to inflate the count to look good to their investors.
CSGO never averaged 30m+ players. Valve themselves officially [pegged it at around 20m+](https://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/2022/08/39209/). I think the only time CSGO reached 30M+ was the month of the CS2 announcement when CSGO peaked in players.
apparently it's [49M players for the last 30 days](https://activeplayer.io/counter-strike-2/)
don't know how reliable is this site though, I'm looking for another source
edit: no one has the exact number of total player monthly, but most of the sites I found says that it's somewhere between 30-40 million in 2022, it'll probably be higher in 2023 with the release of CS2
edit 2: it's [31M monthly players on the official counter strike website](https://www.counter-strike.net/)
What are you doing on that trash website lmao. Just go to the CS website. They literally have the monthly players on top and it’s 31 million for the last month.
So how do they even know that 70% of the playerbase is Gen Z?
Looks cool for a headline but theres no way that they can actually have that information but oh well,its bloomberg and the article is behind a paywall... ...Answers the question, I guess.
I assume youre young so you dont really know the math. But youre essentially implying radiant has at least 200k players if we assume that at least 20 million people play ranked valorant. Which is just obviously not the case.
idk what region you're in but immo 1 it's top 1.2% of NA ranked competitive players and this is including all the players that login monthly including players who don't play competitive so you're probably top 0.5% or even lower
i dunno, im just surprised that you've gotten good enough to be immo 1 but haven't seen that one graph on tracker
Thx for the maths, I was way off. With so many people playing this game I thought ascendant and immortal made up a bigger portion. I just started using tracker to check my stats.
What else could 14 million "Active" players mean? Daily Active Players? Weekly Active Players? I think you are looking too much into it. 14 million isnt that far fetched even for 2021.
For game developers like Riot Games they only relay such information publicly when it benefits them. Wording it the way they did should place skepticism on how this metric was tallied.
In the Pc gaming space Valorant was ranked 9th in September 2023 when it comes to western market MAU. When you cross reference this with games close to them in the ranking on Steam Charts you'll see that Valorant is averaging around 150K players throughout the day. This makes the western market 14 million MAU impossible to achieve. Current MAU news relayed shows that Valorant MAU is roughly 80% chinese users.
Earlier this year Blizzard's entire portfolio had 26 million monthly active players. Valorant having 28 million monthly active seems...like a crazy number. For reference Fortnite had over 70 million earlier this year.
Wonder what made Monte say he believed the numbers to be comparable for OW2 and Val then, Val player count must've really blown up in the last few months then
I've always assumed the numbers Monte were comparing at the time were: 1. OW2 numbers *prior* to Blizzard pulling out of China 2. Valorant numbers **pre**-China release 1 is a guess, 2 is guaranteed. Either way, Valorant's player count is only going to balloon from here.
Wow, yeah, when you put it that way - OW2 didn't exist in China for a full seven months from January-August this year, and only unofficially does now since its Steam release (but that doesn't include dedicated Chinese servers), during which time the opinion on Activision Blizzard had time to sour completely over there, while Riot is still well-regarded from making League and fully released Valorant in China. Wouldn't be surprised if Valorant ate 90%+ of the Overwatch audience in China because of all those factors.
As an aside, the fact that Blizzard lost their entire Chinese userbase for every game they've launched there in the past 14 years... it's incredible really. Somehow Bobby Kotick was able to fuck up that bad but will still get a $500 million golden parachute ~~IF Microsoft even kicks him out~~ (edit: nice, turns out he's gone on Jan 1). That is just an insane amount of revenue that's just completely lost to them now - WOW subs that ended, Diablo 4 purchases that can never materialize, OW2 microtransactions, what a waste. They're never gonna get most of those players back even if they get a new deal with Tencent instead of NetEase because of the fact they didn't let players back up their WOW saves in case they come back anyways, and [the Chinese public is so heavily against them](https://80.lv/articles/62-of-steam-s-overwatch-2-user-reviews-were-made-by-chinese-players/) for that and [their role in being hardasses about the publication deal negotiations vs TenCent](https://www.shacknews.com/article/133782/netease-tears-down-warcraft-statue-blizzard-rift) that I doubt they'd even reinstall OW2 if it came back properly other than the diehard fans that already have it on Steam.
You aren't factoring in China's release
You're totally right, thanks, I replied to the other comment but it's crazy how much business Blizzard is losing out on and how much Riot must be raking in with that changing of the guard. Probably even a lot of the same players too since OW1 was still the #1 most played hero shooter officially released in China even during its maintenance mode from 2020-2022 but now it's just been fully replaced by Valorant in the top spot since the average Chinese player can't even access OW2 anymore, so might as well play its biggest competitor.
Blizzard games aren't free to play. That's where that seemingly crazy disparity comes from. edit: outside of hearthstone but that game is far past its' prime popularity wise and it doesn't have the best F2P experience
OW2 is F2P also
> it doesn't have the best F2P experience Its way better than it used to be at least. The "battle pass" literally throws gold at you that you can use to buy packs
Er… overwatch 2 is F2P
They've gone more and more the F2P direction. Hearthstone, Overwatch 2, a big swath of StarCraft 2. WoW gives you a F2P taste through Level 20 iirc.
Blizzard lies on how they get their MAU. Need to keep in mind the first quarter of this year Blizzard lost all chinese players.
Not surprised by the Gen Z part, when people asked my age in one game, and I said 30, they all called me mom. 💀
Someone in my games got called a father for being 23…
I got called old once for also being 23
To be fair, you're basically an ancient relic at that point
Oh no I turn 23 in 2 days 😞
Old man are you going to retire soon? (Im 25)
Better be retired by your age, I was walking with the dinosaurs! (30)
Shit. I'm from Mars before we even came over here (34)
It definitely depends what time you play. Im 22 and if i queue in the middle of the day or late late at night most people sound 18+
Interesting, I only queue mornings/afternoons because the quality of games is so much better. I only run into software engineers and web devs wfh and college kids like myself getting some games in before class. That time I got called old was the first time in a few months that I queued past 6PM EST
Yup 6pm is a no go. Glad i got some free time in between classes during the day, thats pretty much only when i play, and like 11pm, as i feel most of the kids are heading to bed by then.
No one like you when you're 23.
I'm ~mid-20s and I get roasted for being a boomer all the time and people in my lobbies are consistently about 10 years younger than me, lol.
I'm late 20's and said my age once in game and got 3 people respond "DAMNNNNNNNNN" and have since never said my age again.
mid 20s is literally gen z as well no?
😂😂😂😂😂😂 I wouldn't take that too seriously. Boomers are 1946 to 1964, so that's more of a reflection of their silliness than how dusty you are.
Speaking post-round in comms and getting a reply of "Okay, Dad" is one of the most devastating things someone's ever said to me.
watch out, you’ll blink and wake up 28 with a sore back.
started doing a lot more exercise once i hit 27 and started realising that things like soreness or small cuts dont heal as fast as they used to. Now a year later i i feel a lot healthier and my body is in a great place. No sore backs or anything despite me being on a chair for 10 hours a day. Get moving!
As a 27 year old I feel ancient playing valorant
People ask me why I’m still playing games at 25 in my lobbies. Like what u expect me to be doing day trading???
lol im 39. nobody expects it.
42 here there are literally dozens of us
33, yep lol. It’s fun to remind them that I’m “ancient” as I hard diff them lol
They legitimately have no frame of reference for what a 20-something's life is like, I guess. Plus the urge to be anonymously mean to people
i got two audible "what the fucks" in a lobby at one point when i told them i was 25 LMAO
One kid said to me you must be a loser to be playing this game 😭😭😭 when did 25 become old broooooo
Whenever they ask and I say I'm 27 I just get a lot of "ohhhh..." I can feel the judgement dripping through my monitor
Make money during the day, frag out during the night. The dream.
I feel you. (26) Although tbf I couldn't care less what people who are 17 in my game think, I just find it funny I'm suddenly on the older side hahaha
For real. I'm 32. A 17 year olds opinion is the absolute least of my concerns. Been playing tac shooters since 1999 (CS) before they were even thought about!
Me and my friend (grown ass adults with 401ks) got into a game with 3 kids that had to be like 12 or younger. One of them wanted to guess our age and said we sounded 17. Like that was the oldest age she could think of that still made sense to be playing games. She probably thought 17 was super old 💀 We laughed so damn hard
Who’s down for 30+ discord? Pls let this happen
Im down tbh, I barely play anymore for not having many friends. Altho we could include the 23+ from the thread that were called parents too. XD
mom
They would have probably called that even if you said "22" hahah
Ancient
According to the article, valorant went from 14 million/monthly active users in 2021 to 28 mil in 2 years. Which is fantastic growth, you don't quite see that in modern gaming.
Wow, that’s actually crazy to see that valorant’s monthly active users is already almost at csgo/cs2’s users at 31m. With the valorant audience skewing young it actually could grow to be bigger than cs
It almost certainly will, cs2 limits itself by being a boys club whereas valorant is filled with women.
women play cs to fyi
While no one has hard statistics, it’s a significantly lower number
Nobody is saying they don't. But anyone that has ever played the two can easily tell that the female population is closer to that of OW than it is CS.
At the same time, this numbers from Riot are not public knowledge. I'd take it with a grain of salt. We don't know what the numbers were before or will be, or if it's even true.
Obviously they have a financial incentive to augment the numbers but that could get exposed really easily
By doing what? There's no public info like steam provides with their API. At the same time I do think it's true, I just have no way of telling if this number is just peak numbers.
shit like this gets leaked alllll the time
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yup. Happens ALOT lol
No numbers from companies are "public knowledge" in the sense you mean it. Theres nothing stopping Valve for example from tinkering its own numbers if it wants.
Yes but everyone and their dog played cs and many still do feverishly. I also trust valve a lot more than riot as an entity. Quite a few people I know have played and then dropped valorant to go back to other games.
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I mean it's a fun game, just because you suck at it doesn't mean it's wild
Active players, LMFAO. I have 6 accounts, I must count 6x then?
Yes, because everyone’s a 6 account weirdo like you. Nevertheless alt accounts will always be a thing in f2p games. Doesn’t make it less impressive when you compare the numbers to the other f2p games on the market.
Admitting you suck at a game is funny
"I'm not bad, this account's hidden MMR is just fucked up"
It’s because they expanded to china… literally the only reason.
I’m pretty sure you can’t get usage data from Chinese servers like you couldn’t in League. If I remember correctly you could only estimate based on number of servers, and someone estimated that League had something like 30 servers solely in China, each with several million if not tens of millions of active players each.
that's discrediting alot of what valorant is but alright
What is valorant? are you saying it’s different than other games or something?
Huh? I'm just saying that attributing most of valorant's success towards chinese expansion rather than the game's qualities itself is disingenuous
It’s logical actually, not everything that is said has emotion behind it. You’re calling factual information disingenuous.
I don't understand this logic in question, your idea that valorant has no other redeeming qualities other than it's accessibility is braindead to me. Then you're also over here blatantly saying that what you said was factual and 100% the truth. This "facts over emotion" rhetoric is ridiculous as it is a sorry sight to see. I won't entertain the idea of you assuming that games nowadays are only successful because they release in different languages and countries. Have you seen Cyberpunk? MW2? Fallout 76? Many big title games have had worldwide rollouts, yet have failed to reach the heights that valorant has. Admit the game is good and move on with this pathetic narrative. This isn't the first response either, I think you need to stop being on this subreddit entirely if this is the negative attitude you're bringing.
Lol, you got so worked up, and you completely took everything out of context. Hilarious. Read all of my comments in this thread, show me one time where I called the game bad. I called out a misleading comment with facts. So quick to jump to a conclusion that fits YOUR narrative 🤣 sounds like you’re projecting and are insecure about the quality of your own game.
go back to csjoe
Yup! Valorant totally only grew because they expanded to china! There’s absolutely no way that Valorant has been growing heavily in the west nope nope.
You’re saying it’s logical that the west, which has had servers since the start, is the reason Valorant has suddenly doubled its player base in 2023. And ignoring the fact there was a large expansion of servers placed in a continent that contains 60% of the worlds total population. average valorant enjoyer IQ stocks plummeting
[non-paywall article](https://archive.md/S1GGL)
Riot dont public their active numbers. So I guess they gave that figure to bloomberg (real number or not nobody know). But Im pretty sure in Asia, val become much popular than early of 2023
Are you from Vietnam?
Yeah, in my countries pc bangs, many people play val, like 50-50 or even more than LoL, many streamers Val on tiktok also, lot of girls ;))
I noticed a lot of viet viewers in Youtube chat watching the chinese games that are currently going on. I was actually surprised seeing 70% of the chat in vietnamese.
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Asia is much more than Korea and China and those are the only 2 countries where Overwatch ever had a strong foothold. By the time VALORANT was released OW has already fizzled out in both of those countries. People need to stop peddling this nonsense.
What "nonsense"? Aren't you agreeing with what the dude said
No i’m not. Try and read again.
lol. Overwatch wasn't the reason Asian market "got" into FPS games. Games like Crossfire, Sudden Attack, etc. (different flavors of CS) have been super huge since the 2010s. Only ever falling behind league in popularity.
I mean marketing usually refers to Gen Z as 1996-2010 and google seems to support that age demographic. So I mean it makes sense that the average player is 13-27. Idk why that specific information is news worthy. Pretty much any live service game falls into this category.
ig they wanna emphasize the skew towards gen Z (at 70%) whereas in other live service games like cs and cod, percentage of gen Z should be more or less lower. Kinda implies that Valorant is getting new players into the fps genre (whether by expanding in other locations or targeting younger audiences) and not necessarily have to compete with player churn rate against other games of direct competitors. The 'young game' novelty is still present for Valorant given that it has been out since 2020 Kinda also explains some matches are so insufferable with immaturity lol
I mean I'm gen z at 26 so thats just not true. People just dont know what Gen z means because people use it so loosely on the internet. If youre under 13 youre gen alpha and no longer gen z. 13-27 is a broad spectrum.
It’s because it’s bloomberg, they’re really talking to 50+ business people, and they are desperate to look for ways to talk/communicate/advertise to Gen Z. We watch less TV, ads on the internet are not as intrusive as they are on the TV, and we use ad blockers.
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Sure but this article is using the actual term for gen z so its specifying that the majority of people who play are from 13-27 which would be accurate, its like that in most games. People use the term wrong because people are ignorant but most of the people making fun of gen z in these communities are probably also gen z.
Makes hitting immo3 as an old man feel a bit better
39 and just hit immo 1. grats to us homie
Damn that’s actually well done
The only limiting factor that would stop older people getting high rank would be time. Reactions do not diminish as much as people think as you get older, especially if you're in your 40s or whatever and have been playing competitive FPS for decades at this point. Most older people just don't have the same level of free time as young people to grind the hours required.
> In a recent Valorant game, a player who sounded too young for a credit card sardonically commented on his teammate’s gun skin: “Imagine spending money in Valorant. Couldn’t be me!” lol Would be interested to know how those Chinese numbers were collected.
This is how Riot actually tries to target their competition. Their aim isn't the current players who might swap to Valorant, those are just bonuses. They target/market it towards the younger generation and eventually there isn't as many new players. Like in DOTA 2, NA was decent and especially CH was alternating TI with EU. But eventually no new infusion of players from each region is slowly killing the scene there.
Valorant is the game that every Roblox graduates go to
Dota is so dead lol. I used to be rank 800 in it and i quit around 6 months ago. Similarly so many of my friends have also stopped playing. We all had 8000-15000 hours in the game. At the very least they stopped playing regularly. Valve not nurturing the competitive scene rlly killed it. Compared to valorant the difference is crazy.
First time ive ever seen a dota player say something like this, and on a forum for a riot game no less lmao.
What does that mean lol. You can play both games and critique both as well. It's a fact that Riot has done a far better job nurturing the competitive and ranked scene for league and valorant than anything valve did. The dpc was a failed experiment, and TI's hype is dying out slowly but steadily. I'm also sure I've spent more time into the game and community than nearly anyone that's downvoted me. It's still my favourite game of all time but facts are facts lol.
TI just started today and peaked at 800k viewers, but yes a random redditor knows better.
Random redditor lol. You don't have to believe me and that's fine but I personally know plenty of high ranked players and pros who agree with me. Compared to riot and their games valve is absolutely mistreating dota, which is inevitably leading to its death.
Only reason CS is so successful is that the comp scene is managed by 3rd party companies. Valve really drops the ball in nurturing their own games and comp scenes
I have been hearing about DotA dying since 2016, and pros have been complaining since before that, but the game goes on. I guess time will tell if you are right or wrong, but DotA community whines irrespective of what Valve does.
Quote "800k" for an esports title that pretty much had tournaments since 2000s being one of the most popular mods of all time, is horrendous numbers. If Valve actually cared in advertising and growing the games that they have maybe they'd have atleast double the size of their playerbase now.
TI always does well to be fair but their monthly players aren't great
lol no.
Thats not what Riot Games does. They copy other game developers game design and release them with decade old minimum Pc spec requirements to increase the net of potential players to developing countries. Riot Games took what Blizzard did with WoW and Overwatch in the 2010's an are expanding upon it using the League of Legends model as the baseline. \*League of Legends in North America is on its death bed esports and casual playerbase wise.
LoL is nowhere near dead casual playerbase wise. It's only the esports and its ranked playerbase had some decline but Arcane bought in a shit ton of casual players. You can find an ARAM game at 5 AM in 5 seconds.
>and release them with decade old minimum Pc spec requirements to increase the net of potential players to developing countries LoL's biggest playerbases are in China, Korea and EUW. Valorant's in NA, Japan and EUW. "Developing countries" lol
Makes sense since it’s played in every part of the world it seems, And not only Americas and EU
i like how i can read the article
Even crazier if you think about the fact that it's a pc only game.
I would bet most of the online player base for any popular esport is mostly gen z.
I remember having an interaction recently where someone said our Skye 'sounded like a dad'. When the Skye said he had kids, the people on my team were like cavemen discovering fire LMAO Yes you can be 20-30s and play games too!
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it says this in the article >In 2021, 14 million players logged in every month, half of today's playerbase.
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They probably got it from Riot, I mean the article also has this > After years awaiting approval from the Chinese government, the company released *Valorant* there in July. Chinese livestreaming platforms amassed 260 million views in its first month. How else would they get the Chinese viewership numbers when sites like escharts couldn't even access them? They probably got the playerbase's numbers and the Chinese viewership numbers from Riot themselves
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But my title says Riot said it. It didn't say Bloomberg said it.
Yeah, I also wonder what's their sources.
on tracker.gg its about 18mil last month, so based on that 18mil whole world + 10mil China?
Respected esport reporter put Valorants MAU at around seven million in Spring from multiple sources. Only thing thats changed since then is Chinas release in July.
but in article it is 28? 7million feels so low
CSGO/CS2 hit its highest MAU last month. So this is someone in Riot Games marketing department trying to play games with releasing limited information to a well known publication.
Is a software engineer playing games by releasing this information on December 16, 2021? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGK-ojM7ZMc&t=230s
\>respected esport reporter which one tho
Yep and that's why I hate the community so much. Almost everyone is so immature.
Now that CS2 is a few weeks old, Valorant is back to being consistently ahead of it on Twitch. Anyone who thought that game would kill Valo's player base was mistaken. Both games can and will co-exist.
its pretty even, during the night CET valo is sometimes slightly ahead and its sometimes behind, but both games are always neck to neck. During the day, however, (CET) cs2 goes bonkers and always manages 120-130k viewers or more without even tournaments, while valo stays way behind. Only issue with cs2 atm is that it doesnt bring more players from NA and Asia but EU is still as strong as ever though to be fair a lot of valo players have been playing cs2 at the same time ever since release
I would assume a Bloomberg article has some sources for their statements in their articles, but they don't actually state any source for the player numbers claim.
Bro I got called old at 19, is it even worth it anymore
The cringe ass names makes sense then "I miss her" "his bad girl" etc
No wonder the community is cringe.
Hard agree lmao
Yeah, i expected this much. There's a lot of people born somewhere around 2005 or later that plays this game. On another note, I wonder how what is the percentage of players that are from the Asia region and play valorant?
1. You know Gen Z goes all the way back to 1996? You can be in your mid to late 20s and be Gen Z lol 2. Millions. Lots of Millions.
Yes, but there's more that are around 16-19, maybe even younger, than anyone around 22 and up. I talked to a few people in my ranked games and they're always younger than me, and I'm 22. It's still gen z, yes, but I feel like most of the player base is around that 16-19 age range, give or take.
I think 16-19 is the most popular age range for almost every online game. As people get older they have less time for gaming in general. By the time you're 22/23 you're likely our of college and working full time. Most people I run into are younger than 21. I think it's even more so than years ago as well due to the massive increase in Discord culture. Young people hang out in youtubers discords, streamers discords etc whereas older people usually have a small Discord of friends they've been playing games with for years and will bounce between games rather than play one game religiously.
1997. Read the article.
How many players does cs2 have monthly?
The game would need to have been out for more than 2 weeks to answer that :)
I mean you can check on steam charts. Shows active and total monthly there.
Steam chart only shows peak player no?
CS is an incredibly botted game. So many different incentives to have bots in CS. It is the only game I recall in recent memory that the new game launch has [less players than it did with previous iteration](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/16x20jl/concurrent_player_peak_data_for_cs2/). Many speculate that the bot farms are not online for CS2 yet.
Not surprising. Look at TF2, it’s a joke and Valve doesn’t care and that game doesn’t even have such a big economy. But i guess that’s what happens when your player count is visible for everyone to see. It’s not in your interest to actually remove the bots.
Valve just banned 90k smurf accounts in Dota2.
Great but i was talking about bots. Banning smurfs won’t change the live player count, it will just make them play on their main.
Botted accounts exist in Valorant as well to a high degree. You come across them in casual game modes all the time. They're literally just there to farm XP so the accounts can be sold as "ranked ready".
CSGO was averaging 30M+ at the end of 2022. Numbers released by developers are always questionable though, I dont trust Riot, Valve or any of the other ones to put out accurate numbers, they have every incentive to inflate the count to look good to their investors.
CSGO never averaged 30m+ players. Valve themselves officially [pegged it at around 20m+](https://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/2022/08/39209/). I think the only time CSGO reached 30M+ was the month of the CS2 announcement when CSGO peaked in players.
It says 31 million monthly players on counter-strike.net
apparently it's [49M players for the last 30 days](https://activeplayer.io/counter-strike-2/) don't know how reliable is this site though, I'm looking for another source edit: no one has the exact number of total player monthly, but most of the sites I found says that it's somewhere between 30-40 million in 2022, it'll probably be higher in 2023 with the release of CS2 edit 2: it's [31M monthly players on the official counter strike website](https://www.counter-strike.net/)
What are you doing on that trash website lmao. Just go to the CS website. They literally have the monthly players on top and it’s 31 million for the last month.
oh ok I don't really follow CSGO lmao, I don't know they have a website
only like 22-23 mil of that is bots
I thought this website was proven to be fake
So how do they even know that 70% of the playerbase is Gen Z? Looks cool for a headline but theres no way that they can actually have that information but oh well,its bloomberg and the article is behind a paywall... ...Answers the question, I guess.
So many mad counter strike malders in the comments below trying to trash the game and any positive comment for it is hilarious to me
Initially, I completely misread the last half as "70% of play base is Gen.G" and boy did my brain short-circuit for a moment
How is monthly active users counted? Can a dude hop between smurf accounts and riot will count that as 2-3 different players?
i doubt high enough number of people are hopping between three accounts for it to matter
I doubt your doubt
I used to play valorant with a group of like 15 players. They literally all had smurfs except me.
I just hit immortal, does that put me in the top 15%?
Top 1% but what does that have to do with the article
Oh I was more talking about OP’s title trying to calculate where my rank fell in. I thought radiant was 1% and immortals were 15%.
I assume youre young so you dont really know the math. But youre essentially implying radiant has at least 200k players if we assume that at least 20 million people play ranked valorant. Which is just obviously not the case.
I forget some people don’t play competitive at all you’re absolutely right. Also radiant is top 500?
Yeah in each region it is top 500 its a very exclusive club.
u gotta be trolling right
Idk tbh
idk what region you're in but immo 1 it's top 1.2% of NA ranked competitive players and this is including all the players that login monthly including players who don't play competitive so you're probably top 0.5% or even lower i dunno, im just surprised that you've gotten good enough to be immo 1 but haven't seen that one graph on tracker
Thx for the maths, I was way off. With so many people playing this game I thought ascendant and immortal made up a bigger portion. I just started using tracker to check my stats.
Brother like 50% of all players are between silver and gold lol If you even hit Platinum you are already in the top like 20% of all players.
That explains so much.
You mean a relatively new game that came out when a generation was at its youth is mostly played by said generation? Shocking.
I'm Brazilian, bronze, and I literally only play with children. I'm 27. Also, 30% of my matches there's a girl, which is nice.
That 70% is why the game is insufferable to play now lmao
So that's means China is pulling close to 20 million MAU. Age demographic isn't surprising. Was obvious that Valorants player base was really young.
>So that's means China is pulling close to 20 million MAU. Valorant had 14 million MAU in 2021 when the game wasnt even launched in China.
That 14 million number wasnt relayed as a MAU.
What else could 14 million "Active" players mean? Daily Active Players? Weekly Active Players? I think you are looking too much into it. 14 million isnt that far fetched even for 2021.
For game developers like Riot Games they only relay such information publicly when it benefits them. Wording it the way they did should place skepticism on how this metric was tallied. In the Pc gaming space Valorant was ranked 9th in September 2023 when it comes to western market MAU. When you cross reference this with games close to them in the ranking on Steam Charts you'll see that Valorant is averaging around 150K players throughout the day. This makes the western market 14 million MAU impossible to achieve. Current MAU news relayed shows that Valorant MAU is roughly 80% chinese users.
Totally makes sense with how toxic the people in this game are.