Valorant Launches on June 2 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 21 May 2020 / 477 Views
Riot Games announced today the first-person shooter, Valorant, will launch as a free-to-play title on June 2. The game has been in closed beta for a while now, which will end on May 28.
All accounts from the closed beta will have their data and ranks wiped clean, and all players will be refunded any Valorant Points spent during the beta and will get a 20 percent bonus.
"We're continuously making improvements," said developer Joe Ziegler speaking with ESPN in an interview. "Our next patch is going to have improvements for some of those issues, as well. And the patch following that will have even more improvements for that problem.
"I think the question more for us is if we will feel the larger player pool is ready to be held back for that? For us, we want to provide the start of service where we can begin to continuously patch through and let players in while testing the game more for all those people who were excluded from the closed beta phase."
Riot Games revealed Valorant has almost three million daily active players in the closed beta and wants a constant stream of new content and updates to the game once it launched to keep players engaged.
"We have almost 3 million playing daily right now," said Developer Anna Donlon.
"I think we're really, really excited to see what's happening in Brazil right now. I don't want to say surprised, I think Brazil was a [region] we really wanted. In Brazil, we just felt the FPS community is so strong and we were really excited to see if they would like our game and stay engaged. What we're seeing in Brazil is really great. I'm delighted with what we're seeing in Brazil."
Valorant will launch with a second game mode that will have a beta tag attached to it.
"We're going to launch with a second [game] mode, but we're putting a 'beta' tag on that mode," Donlon said. "That's because we haven't spent any time with the community at all playing it. So we want it to feel a little more like, 'What about this mode?' instead of a hard commit that this is the second game mode in Valorant . We want players to play it with us and give us feedback. It's not [team deathmatch], I just want to clarify that."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
