Valorant reaches 14M players per month

Valorant, Riot Games’ tactical first-person shooter, averages over 14 million players a month, the developer announced Wednesday. The announcement comes on the first anniversary of Valorant’s launch.

This number includes the players from Valorant’s extremely successful mid-quarantine launch, but according to executive producer Anna Donlon, who spoke to Polygon in a video interview, while the game experienced a dip after launch, its player count has gone up significantly after that dip as well and the 14 million number is close to where the game was at launch.

“For us it is incredibly exciting to like, in just a year, be able to build that kind of momentum,” Donlon said. “And now to maintain that kind of momentum for a while now. I think it’s a testament to our dev team, and all of their commitment to our player base. […] [Valorant] definitely exceeded our expectations at launch and now has like come back to a state where we’re like ‘wow, that wasn’t just a launch-day fluke.’”

On top of its impressive player numbers, Riot also just concluded Valorant’s first international LAN tournament. The tournament, called Valorant Masters Reykjavik, racked up more than one million concurrent views during its finals, which featured a match between North America’s Sentinels and Europe’s Fnatic — which Sentinels won in an impressive 3-0 sweep. Those viewership numbers are the highest any Valorant tournament has earned so far and rank near other top esports like Riot’s own League of Legends or Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Riot also announced a new version of Valorant specifically designed for mobile devices, which should help bring the game to even more players when it launches — possibly sometime in the next year.