Valorant closed beta rushes to 1.7M viewers on Twitch

After LoL, Riot now wants to make Valorant the next Twitch phenomenon.

With the tactical shooter Valorant, Riot wants to outpace competitors like Overwatch and CS: GO. For this, the developer used a clever strategy for yesterday’s launch of the closed beta: Keys were only available via Twitch Drops.

The concept worked, overall saw over 1.7 million viewers to. That is about 400,000 more than CS: GO reached on the platform on its strongest day.

Why Riot’s beta tactics worked

Valorant benefited from the fact that many viewers sat extremely long in front of the streams or even watched several at the same time, hoping for one Key for the closed beta to obtain. Whether this really increased their chances of getting which one is questionable: the exact rules according to which Twitch Drops are distributed to viewers of streams are unclear.

The official FAQ only contains the following information:

• In order to have the chance of drops, you must have a Twitch account, link your game account (in the case of Valorant this is your Riot account) and watch participating streams.
• It is not possible to connect multiple accounts of the same game with one Twitch account.
• Developers determine how many drops there are.
• According to Twitch, there is theoretically no upper limit on how many drops you can receive. It should be possible to be lucky several times.

The system appears to be based on randomness. However, there were always debates as to whether factors such as IP address or the time spent in the stream play a role. So far there is no official information.

The tactic of artificially driving up the number of viewers is not new: Escape From Tarkov, too, experienced a boom at Twitch at the beginning of the year thanks to targeted marketing. However, the figures fell far short of the current values ​​of Valorant.

Many players are upset

Riot himself is enthusiastic about the numerical success. In between, the developer had to interrupt key distribution because the servers were overwhelmed by the high demand. According to Riot, the drops should now be reactivated.

Wir haben kurzfristig die Ausgabe von Betazugängen pausiert um die Serverprobleme zu beheben. Ihr könnt aber trotzdem weiterschauen, wir werden Zuschauer für Zugänge vormerken. Die eigentliche Verteilung passiert aber erst wenn sich die Server stabilisiert haben!

— VALORANT (@valorantde) April 7, 2020

The reactions of players to the Twitch action were sometimes very mixed: Under the tweet, many complain about the strategy. Because, according to them, the principle of chance can be extremely unfair. Some complain that they spent the entire day before streams and didn’t get a key, while others got beta access after half an hour.

Chat bots should also have advantages: These allegations are read again and again on social media platforms. It is not out of the question that some of the Twitch users have bumped themselves into better drop chances by being able to participate with more accounts. However, there is no official statement on this yet either.

The feedback on the beta itself was rather mixed. Some well-known streamers criticized it as being too simple and not independent enough.

Heiko also believes that the Valorant beta is missing something crucial. On the other hand, editor Phil, who was able to play in before the beta, considers Valorant to be THE next big multiplayer shooter.