Valorant closed beta launches and attracts large Twitch viewership

Riot Games has launched the closed beta for competitive shooter Valorant, drawing significant interest on Twitch.

An hour and a half after the closed beta began on Tuesday, Valorant Twitch streams were being watched by over 1.4 million concurrent viewers – 9.5 times as many as the platform’s second most viewed live channel, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Announcing the Valorant closed beta in late March, Riot said it will initially be available in Europe, Canada, the US, Turkey, Russia and CIS countries, although there are plans to launch it in more regions “if possible”.

The company said it hopes to let hundreds of thousands of players sample the game via the beta ahead of the title’s planned summer 2020 release.

The studio also said it wants to keep the closed beta “as short as we can while getting additional regions online. That said, if we hear a lot of unexpected feedback from players during this period, we’ll reevaluate.”

Beta progression won’t be carried over to the final product, which Riot bills as “tactical shooter meets hypernatural powers”.

The 5v5 character-based FPS was recently shown off in an alpha gameplay video captured from an internal developer playtest.

Valorant players will benefit from 128-tick servers and a global spread of datacenters targeting under 35ms of ping in major cities. according to Riot.

It claims most minimum spec computers will play Valorant at 30 frames per second, while modern rigs will offer 60-144 FPS.

Watch live video from fextralife on www.twitch.tv

According to website Twitchmetrics, Riot’s League of Legends was the most viewed game on Twitch over the past 30 days, racking up over 119 million viewer hours, some 18 million more than the second placed game, Call of Duty Warzone.

Twitch owner Amazon is planning to introduce “interactive games” on the platform this summer, which will allow viewers to affect the gameplay they’re streaming.

“We love this idea that you have a player, a streamer and a viewer all sharing in this synchronous interactive environment of Twitch,” Mike Frazzini, Amazon’s vice president for game services and studios, said recently.