Organic Hype in a Broken Genre

Riot Games must be having a happy picnic at the park right now. Well, a Sims 4 type of picnic since they shouldn't be outside (stay at home people).  
Valorant's mojo has a reason and it's not just streamers being thirsty. Let's look at it.

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Where are we at?

‍Before we even heard about Project A (now called Valorant) the FPS category in esports was under a hole of uncertainty:

• CS:GO: solid esport. Lots of drama and power fights between organizers.
• Overwatch: doing like shit, low viewership, and a complicated schedule.
• Fortnite: not prepared or aimed to be an esport. Not their priority.
• Apex Legends: can't manage to make it big only through Battle Royale tournaments.
• Rainbow 6 Siege: slowly growing. Has potential.
• Call of Duty: their re-structure worked so far, if we look at it as a long term vision.

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The industry fanbase has committed with two types of FPS so far:

👉  Realistic shooting genre. Already well-covered by CS:GO and COD.
👉  A bit more imaginary shooting genre. Well-covered by nobody.
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Free Hype

‍Apex Legends saw what was happening with Overwatch and Fortnite and had their opportunity which didn't last long because of three problems:

• They didn't have a good security system, it was hackers' paradise.
• Gave money to every big streamer to play it, which then resonated with fans like "they are only playing cuz they're making bank".
• They focused on battle royal competition, hard to make it esports ready.

When we thought everything was lost, Riot Games announced a game that would fill the void of a fantasy shooting game, which isn't as crazy as Overwatch and it has some aspects from CS:GO... humm yas queen?

All these popular streamers flaming Fortnite, Overwatch pros afraid of failure, TO's looking for new esports and bandwagon fans share something in common: they know Riot is really f^cking good at creating an esport structure.
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From broken genre to broken records

‍Once the game is released, they will get some crazy looking numbers. Because:

• It's purely aimed to be an esport.
• Know-how ready. League of Legends is a massive success.
• Every big personality and pro player is promoting it for free.
• The Beta keys campaign and PR has been organic gold so far.
• They don't fully compete with CS:GO or COD.
• Thanks to Apex, the guinea pig, Riot invested in a good security system.
• OWL/Fortnite players have "Valorant Pro" as their Twitter tag already 😂

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Only problem I see in the horizon: if Valorant's majority player base consists in League of Legends transfers, toxicity will make the average player want to quit in a couple weeks and all the hype will be around pro players competing in a game that nobody wants to be mentally invest with.

Resources
Valorant partnered with Twitch for closed beta access.

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