Valorant dominates during beta with new Twitch viewership milestone

Valorant has already set a major Twitch milestone by helping the platform to more than 4 million viewers at one time, and it almost dethroned League of Legends in the process.

The closed beta for Riot Games’ new team-based shooter went live on April 7, and the only way for most people to get a shot at gaining access was to watch the game on Twitch to try and get a drop.

Because of this, and the insane amount of hype with it finally coming out, Valorant saw over 1.7 million concurrent Twitch viewers on Tuesday, and came close to taking League of Legend’s top peak-viewership spot.

Over 1.7 million viewers at once was enough to surpass Fortnite’s peak of 1.69 million during the 2019 World Cup, which was a record-setting event in its own right.

Even though it didn’t set a milestone on its own, Valorant definitely contributed to an all-time milestone of 4 million concurrent viewers on the platform.

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Despite climbing to within 50,000 peak viewers of LoL, it wasn’t able to take the top spot, but for a game on its first real day of being streamed on Twitch, over 1.7 million people watching at once and a new Twitch record aren’t half bad at all.

Twitch

Valorant dominated Twitch on April 7, the first day its closed beta was live.

Looking at it from Riot’s perspective, the developers have to be pretty happy that it’s their two games that currently hold first and second place for peak viewers on the platform.

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Valorant probably could have gotten even more viewers, and maybe even broken the record, had Riot not blocked esports organizations from streaming the beta on launch day.

Riot Games

Riot said not allowing esports organizations to stream Valorant on launch day was so there was no “competitive advantage.”

Riot still gave teams beta access, but requested that they not stream until April 8, so that players had “equal opportunity” to get access from drops on the 7th from the content creators that had already been streaming.

If you weren’t one of the lucky few to get access on April 7, don’t panic. Riot have confirmed they’ll be staggering access to the beta and will be sending out additional invites as the servers become able to handle the additional players.