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Valorant's closed beta pulled in 3m daily players

Raze your sights.

Only a few days remain until Valorant launches in full on 2nd June, and now the two-month closed beta has wrapped up, Riot has published some statistics on how it went. The main takeaway: Valorant is pretty popular, surprise surprise.

According to stats from Riot, "an average of nearly 3 million players logged on each day to play Valorant", which is impressive considering you had to jump through several hoops to actually gain access. We'll have to wait until Valorant's full launch to see how its player numbers measure up to other big titles such as Fortnite and Minecraft. Or, dare I say it, CS:GO - which earlier this year kept breaking its own record for concurrent players, and even managed to tip over the 1m concurrents mark.

Something that does give us a better indication of interest in Valorant, however, are Twitch viewing figures. Riot says fans watched more than 470m hours of gameplay on Twitch during the closed beta, while Twitch stats website Twitch Metrics lists Valorant as the most-watched game for May (ignoring the just chatting category). Valorant also broke Twitch's record for the "single-day hours watched in a single game" category, with 34m hours watched on day one.

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Valorant's popularity on Twitch is hardly surprising: Riot has encouraged close ties between the two from the start, handing out beta keys to players once they'd linked their Riot and Twitch accounts and watched specific Valorant streams. Everyone being stuck in lockdown has probably helped both player numbers and stream views quite a bit: Twitch's overall viewership recently grew 99 per cent year-on-year to 1.5bn hours watched in April, of which Valorant was responsible for 334m (via Gamesindustry.biz).

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