I wanted to use this week’s blog as a way to write out my thoughts on random topics that have been on my mind recently. First I want to start off with the launch of the new Riot title Valorant and how the beta launch has affected the landscape of other games.

To start off with Valorant, the launch was a huge hit with gamers across different game communities forming this mixed player community. To be totally honest the launch worked out way better than it should have, I love the game so far, but objectively it’s a really flawed game. I feel that the sudden surge with the launch can be traced back to the idea that the current game landscape in terms of a competitive fps was very stagnant. Games like Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, and CS:GO were the options people had for competitive shooters for quite a few years at this point, and it could be argued that these brands held a little bit of a monopoly on the competitive shooters genre: CS:GO in specific was one of the most popular of these games. I’m gonna use CS:GO in specific as an example here where Valve’s track record on responding to what the community wants has been very sparse.  But suddenly a week after Valorant’s launch there were quite a few updates rolled out and some concerns that the pros brought up that day with something minor (a bug with crosshair settings) were fixed within a few hours of being stated on Twitter. Why suddenly is Valve so responsive and proactive now? Now that a game could be competing for the player base that CS:GO had for so long is now leaving for Valorant. An example of one of many cases is a semi pro CS:GO player named Tyson Ngo aka “TenZ” was pursuing his career in CS:GO and had his chance with the organization known as Cloud9. Shortly after the hype of Valorant was spreading, TenZ made the move from being a CS:GO pro and signed with Cloud9 for Valorant. With all of this in mind the point I wanted to show is that when Valve had more control and a dedicated player base they were not as urgent with keeping the players happy since no other game could give what CS:GO could provide. Overall CS:GO is still going to be very dominant at this point in time, but now Valve is being cautious of the competitor Valorant. Given enough time anyone could be dethroned.