Riot Games announces June 2 release date for VALORANT

Riot Games announced Thursday that its 5-on-5 character-based tactical shooter VALORANT will launch for free on June 2 across a majority of regions worldwide.

It’s @RiotSuperCakes and @RiotZiegler back with an important update on the future of VALORANT. pic.twitter.com/qGZfv3DWEb

— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) May 21, 2020

North America, Europe, South Korea, Brazil, Oceania, Japan and more will be able to play the game starting June 2 in a staggered rollout across the globe. The game’s closed beta, which began on April 7, will come to an end on May 28, enabling the team at Riot to reset player accounts, patch new content and prepare for the beginning of VALORANT’s worldwide launch.

For the game’s official release, a new agent, map and beta game mode will be added along with a slew of new weapon skins and a battle pass system.

More: VALORANT 101 | Developing VALORANT’s industrial, electronic beats | What VALORANT devs learned in the closed beta

“Our goal has always been to bring VALORANT to as much of the world as soon as possible, so we’re hyped to be able to do so on June 2,” said Anna Donlon, executive producer of VALORANT at Riot Games. “The team looks forward to starting our decades-long commitment to servicing the global VALORANT community. This is just the beginning of our journey together.”

During the VALORANT closed beta, the game averaged almost three million players daily, Donlon said. To meet rising player demand, Riot has also prioritized additional new game server deployments on their short-term road map in order to lower latency for VALORANT players; these new server locations include Atlanta, Dallas, London, Madrid and Warsaw.

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On Twitch, one of the biggest streaming platforms in the world, the game nearly broke the concurrent viewership record with VALORANT’s opening day in closed beta, with the game peaking at over 1.7 million viewers watching various streams playing the game for the first time. Along with top players and streaming personalities playing the game, viewers were given a chance to win access to the beta themselves in certain channels. The game nearly eclipsed Riot’s own record held by League of Legends, which holds a Twitch-record 1.74 million concurrents.