The success of valorant events lies in the construction of multi-dimensional event ecology.
On 13 December, the last event of the VALORANT Championship Tour, the World Championship, came to an end in Berlin. Teams Acend and Gambit from the EMAE division (EMEA) fought for 5 innings, and in the end, team Acend won the first VALORANT Global Championship with a score of 3:2.
More than a year has passed since VALORANT opened the global public beta, and in the past year, VALORANT's popularity has continued to rise both in the player community and on the overseas live broadcasting platform Twitch. As a very competitive work, VALORANT has received a lot of attention around the world, and what innovation it will bring to FPS has become a new problem for us to think.
With the successful landing of the first VALORANT global event, it can be seen that this emerging FPS event has achieved initial success. Importantly, VALORANT is also changing the ecology of FPS e-sports through its own characteristics and helping FPS e-sports achieve higher industrial influence.
Valorant aims to create a global FPS head event
Since its official debut last year, VALORANT has been attracting market attention, and its popularity has continued to grow after the game opened for testing.
Let's first look at a set of data, during last year's more than a month of closed beta, VALORANT set a peak of 1.7 million people on the overseas live broadcast platform Twitch, with a single day viewing time of up to 34 million hours, and a total weekly viewing time of more than 128 million hours.
This data not only broke the record for the total number of single-day viewing hours of a single game on the Twitch platform, but also exceeded the record of 125 million monthly viewing hours for the 2019 S Tournament of League of Legends under Fist. This also directly reflects that VALORANT has become a veritable phenomenon-level multiplayer competitive shooting product.
Valorant's success at the market level, in addition to the influence of the fist game itself and the "goods" of the major well-known anchors in the early days, VALORANT's unique game language and all-round ecological construction make this new FPS game a head FPS game.
First of all, from the perspective of the game itself, valorant's "lightweight" has become one of the important factors for the product to cover the global market. The minimum requirements of the four generations of i3 processors, GT730 graphics cards, the highest requirements are only the configuration requirements of the 4th generation i5 and 1050ti graphics cards, it can be intuitively said that players do not need to consider hardware problems at all when experiencing VALORANT, most of the devices in the current market have met the requirements of the maximum image quality of VALORANT 144hz refresh rate, and low-end devices can also run smoothly at 60 frames.
From the perspective of configuration requirements, VALORANT has been deliberately lowering the threshold of player experience. By covering low-end device users in a lightweight and all-round way, VALORANT has also sunk to a deeper level of the market, and the number of downloads in the world has made a qualitative leap.
If the game is open to all players, it constitutes the primary element of success. Then "player community" is another keyword of VALORANT.
This is evident on multiple levels, including the development team's launch of the "Player Journey", collecting player feedback to directly change the game's content, and uniting players around the world into a global community to create memorable and exciting moments through global creators, media and culture. For VALORANT, a game launch is the starting point, not the end.
Specific to the level of game content, VALORANT and the core experience of traditional FPS games are consistent, it is still a pure shooting competitive experience, and it is still the player's level of operation that determines the direction of victory in the game. In the actual experience of the game, it can be understood that the setting of "character + skill" will not affect the fairness of the game, but more for the team's tactics to play an auxiliary role.
Of course, the bold setting of "character + skill" also brings a more diversified game content experience. Compared with the way CS:GO requires each player to train the operation to the extreme, VALORANT's skills enrich the game content while also adding more space to the tactics in FPS games.
At the same time, VALORANT provides players with a highly playable game experience through the kernel-level driver Vanguard anti-cheat system, combined with the detection and ban of plug-ins.
For The Fist, VALORANT is not only a highly playable FPS product, but also an e-sports project designed to impact the world's top FPS events. As VALORANT, which is endorsed by a leading e-sports company, combined with the global influence of the product itself and a wide user base, as well as high competitiveness and high ornamentation, VALORANT's e-sports event was given high expectations from the beginning.
In the same year that the game went live, VALORANT hosted the global event "First Strike" tournament. This event is also the first test of The Fist's aim to create a global event. Although the layout of the event is in its infancy, the scale of participation already has the ability to impact global events.
The game itself has obvious esports attributes, the esports events that were promoted synchronously in the early stages of the launch, and the actions that have promoted the development of esports events in the past year. The potential of the VALORANT event may help Fist to create a global head FPS event.
Valorant events help revolutionize the FPS esports industry
Thanks to Fist's operational experience in esports events, after the announcement of VALORANT, participants in the global esports industry began a forward-looking layout. The explosion of VALORANT and the fist to valorant's e-sports system construction are also greatly related. The feedback from the market also shows the potential of this e-sports event.
In November, Esports Awards announced the winners of the annual international awards in esports, valorant won the best esports game of the year award. In this year's annual game event, TGA, VALORANT has also been nominated in "Best Esports Game" and "Best Esports Event".
After VALORANT officially opened its public beta in 2020, it launched the VCT (VALORANT Champions Tour) throughout the year in less than a year. Due to the short FPS schedule, the event is divided into different levels: Challenger, Masters, LCQ (Last Chance Qualifiers) and Global Championships. The Challenger and Masters divide the entire 2021 season into three phases, with teams having multiple opportunities to earn points through these events to challenge the final Global Championship qualification.
In the third stage of the Masters in Berlin in September this year, VALORANT set a record of a single game with a maximum of 810,000 viewers, a total of 33.41 million hours of viewing time, and an average of 390,000 viewers. From the level of event data alone, it can be seen that VALORANT, which aims to create the world's top FPS event, has achieved a fairly good result in the event, and with the growth of users, as well as the entry of clubs and brands, the scale of the event will usher in further expansion.
Valorant events don't just have good results. Traditional FPS events are all around the classic mode rules, to carry out a more accelerated pace of operation competition, it is for this reason that FPS events are simple and clear, even in the absence of game foundation, you can also understand the event.
By adding the unique form of innovation of "character + skill", VALORANT not only preserves the basic experience of the "gun enemy" event, but also further increases the horizontal breadth and fun of the team's strategic combination with the help of skill setting. At the same time, due to the difference in the ability of the two sides, different characters can obtain different forms of local advantages such as "healing, vision, and field of vision obstruction" for the team through their own skills.
For event users, the setting of skills can bring a sense of freshness that other traditional FPS products cannot provide, and this is fed back into the esports event, which will make VALORANT events more uncertain, and explore higher ceilings in tactical arrangements and team cooperation.
In addition, the chapter-style high-frequency stable content update adopted by VALORANT since its launch will also play an important role in helping to present more fresh experiences of event content.
Valorant's update method divides the game content into three levels: CHAPEL, ACT, and EPISODE, through this form, players will have a stable expectation of when to update heroes, when to update new plots, and when to update maps.
The continuously updated game content will also be mapped to the e-sports event, and through the rapid update and iteration of the game content, it will help the e-sports to continuously present more fresh experiences and achieve sustainable development. Effectively solve the problem of user viewing fatigue, and continuously enhance users' freshness of e-sports events.
At the same time, VALORANT has also continuously innovated in multiple dimensions at the level of e-sports derivative content. In the third stage of the Masters in Berlin, Fist unveiled the theme of the event "Ars Longa, Vita Brevis". In terms of stage beauty, Fist creatively combines the scenes in the game with AR technology, making it a highly artistic and aesthetic e-sports event scene for the audience.
In addition, Fist also released the theme song of "Die for You" in the final "Global Championship" stage of VCT, and produced an MV animation based on the game and event content. With the same theme as the League of Legends S tournament every year, "Die for You", as the theme song of the 2021 VALORANT Global Championship, is very much in line with the esports spirit of "fighting side by side" with teammates in VALORANT events.
Not only that, valorant also launched the "Art Without End" documentary before the global championship. In this documentary, Fist has collaborated with artists in different fields such as painting, music, and VR painting with the contestants as the core, integrating e-sports and art in a deeper way, and highlighting the theme of this competition, "The Art of Greatness".
It can be seen that VALORANT, as an innovator of FPS e-sports, has brought users a high-quality event content ecology and more trendy e-sports experience through innovative game content and linkage of various art forms, and has also built a richer e-sports content ecology for FPS e-sports events.
VALORANT already has the potential to create the world's premier FPS event
The reason why VALORANT has the ability to create a global head FPS event is not only because of the huge user base, including the combination of multiple factors such as event scale, business model, and event system, which makes VALORANT have the ability to create head FPS events.
If you want to create an FPS e-sports with international influence, the premise is that there is a large enough user base, a high-level event system, and a business model that is large enough and can continue to operate.
First of all, at the user level, according to the data released by Fist on the first anniversary of the release of VALORANT, VALORANT has more than 14 million monthly active players, and a total of 500 million games have been played. From this data, it can be seen that VALORANT already has a huge user volume. This also created a solid basic disk for VALORANT to impact the FPS event head market.
In addition to the huge number of users, a high enough starting point is also an important factor for VALORANT to be able to look forward to FPS head esports events. After two successful tests of the waters of last year's IGNATITE and FIRST STRIKE international competitions, VALORANT's Championship Tour is also on track.
And VCT event, as the official global event of Fist, will attract more participants to the event ecology by relying on fist's influence in the global e-sports industry. This is not without precedent, in the previous First Strike event, VALORANT has received sponsorship from different brands such as Amazon Prime, Prime Gaming, Verizon, Red Bull, JBL, SecretLab and Playzilla. For brands, sponsoring VALORANT events, which are still in the initial stages, is undoubtedly a wise choice, and as the scale of events continues to increase, brands will gain more exposure in the future.
In addition, with the gradual advancement of VCT events, the brand appeal of VALORANT events will be further expanded, and more sponsors will be introduced to participate in this event system.
At the level of e-sports clubs and players, the event ecology built by Fist can provide a more sound development mechanism for clubs, players and other enterprises in the industry. Looking back at CS:GO, nearly 40 companies launched the layout when they landed on the national service, but the lack of event ecology led to the decline of enthusiasm of the clubs, which also led to few domestic clubs involved in the project. Thanks to the success of the League of Legends event, VALORANT has announced the formation of valorant branches before the public beta, including Faze, T1, Gen.G, G2 and other head clubs.
In fact, it is not difficult to understand that the layout of a new e-sports event, in addition to considering the global influence of game IP, but also consider the "event hosting ability, event ecological construction, event development prospects" and other factors. And that's exactly what fists have.
For the club, it is obviously more meaningful to have an earlier layout than to see the esports events have a certain scale of re-entry.
In addition, the attractiveness of the event is also reflected in the level of players. Over the past year or so, valorant events have attracted a large number of overwatch and CS:GO pros to transform.
Among them are Sinatraa, the double MVP of OWL's second season and the 2019 World Cup, as well as ShadowBurn, who is regarded as a world-class Genji player, and Overwatch players such as Washington Justice's Corey, who have all transformed valorant. In the CS:GO circle, many well-known players including Hiko, TenZ, ScreaM and other well-known players have also transformed into VALORANT events. In addition, many well-known Twitch FPS anchors, including Shroud and nothing, as well as CS: GO Top20 professional players such as s1mple, zywoo, and Elige, have also broadcast VALORANT live for many times.
From the perspective of the ecological development of the event and the commercial scale, VALORANT not only has a solid foundation for development, but also will complete more breakthroughs in the FPS e-sports industry in the future, bringing more new formats to the FPS e-sports industry.
The huge user base, the clear development context of the event ecology, the continuous development of the business ecology, and the continuous updating and iteration of the event content experience, it is precisely because of the innovation and exploration in these different dimensions that we see the possibility that VALORANT is expected to create a global head FPS event.