A new blog post by Riot Games’ Joe Ziegler and Anna Donlon offers a lot of insight into the developers’ thought process after day one of the VALORANT beta, which broke Twitch records.
Riot hasn’t offered a number of how many people are playing the beta right now, but its popularity is apparent in Twitch’s numbers. VALORANT broke Twitch’s day one record with 34 million hours of viewership and well over one million people have been watching on both days in an effort to earn beta access.
“We’ll be straightforward with you as we’ve always been: we need to make sure we’re not overloading our servers,” Riot said. “If yesterday was an indication, we need to make sure we ramp slowly as hundreds of thousands—we hope—of players start piling in at the same time. We still think we’re ready to lean in and solve these problems, but we’re not going to lie to you in saying we don’t have problems to solve.”
The work-in-progress beta has seen tremendous demand, with people even creating multiple accounts to try to get into the beta. Accounts with access are being sold online, too. But Riot said those bought accounts could be banned.
“We want to support a stable, competitive, high-fidelity gameplay experience above all, even if that means limiting the number of people we can support for now,” Riot said. “We can’t and won’t undermine gameplay quality for the sake of getting everyone in. This means we’ll continue to be careful about how many players we let into Closed Beta over the course of the next few days and weeks—it’s a lot of players, but honestly not nearly as much as the current demand we’re seeing. This might die off—we’re a new game—but we’re not going to ignore it.”
VALORANT is due to launch sometime this summer. The closed beta has no set end date yet, so it should continue to be a hot commodity.
