From the moment Valorant was unveiled on the League of Legends tenth anniversary stream, it captivated gamers around the world. Now, just days before its full release, Riot Games has revealed that on average nearly three million people logged every single day during the two month-long closed beta.
The hype around the new tactical shooter, which borrows elements from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch, and other games, started properly on April 7. Valorant broke the Twitch record for the most hours streamed in a single day and came close to LoL Worlds 2019 record for peak concurrent viewers thanks to its closed beta access drop system.
“We’re blown away by the level of enthusiasm, passion, and support we’re seeing from the Valorant community in these last days before launch,” said Anna Donlon, executive producer says in the press release. “Our hope as a team was that our years of effort and focus would earn us the trust and respect of the tac-shooter community, and we cannot wait to kick things off and get started.”
During the two month-long closed beta, the development team also fixed 1,254 bugs, 383 of which were found by the players themselves. Valorant was patched six times in its closed beta state, but it had 2,409 server crashes. On top of all of that, thousands of cheaters have been banned, with 7,786 caught by Riot trying to bypass their hardware bans.
VALORANT Closed Beta was an opportunity for us to learn what worked, what didn’t, and what you’d need from us to have the best experience playing VALORANT. With your help, here’s what we accomplished in the last two months. Thanks to players around the world for joining in! pic.twitter.com/oUWmqcfLiY
— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) May 28, 2020
While Riot is clearly celebrating the successes of the last two months, there’s still plenty of work to be done before the game launches on June 2. Players have been promised a new map, a new mode, and a new agent for launch – who makes an appearance in the shiny new key art we were provided – as well as a new name for the Valorant rank, so we’ve got lots to look forward to in the next few days.