100 Thieves announced their first Valorant tournament last night! The 100 Thieves Invitational: Valorant will be taking place on April 14 @ 10 am PT.
Valorant is Riot Games’ first foray into the competitive FPS genre. It’s the love-child of Counter-Strike and Overwatch in the best possible way. It has 5v5 bomb-defusal action coupled with a series of unique heroes with abilities. It’s being talked about as the next big thing, and it’s clear to see why.
Both Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Overwatch are near-timeless in their popularity. CS: GO has been out since 2012, and Overwatch since 2016. Both have stood the test of time and remain popular amongst casual and competitive players alike. TimTheTatMan is just one of a whole host of content creators who think that Valorant will explode. It set Twitch streaming records last week, so maybe they’re onto something.
100 Thieves are boasting that the 100 Thieves Invitational: Valorant will have 8 top-tier teams participating, with some of the “biggest content creators in the world” taking part! You feel like the hype can only grow in the next couple of days for this important event. For a game that will almost definitely be a hit in the eSports world, hosting its first tournament is huge.
Will Valorant Be The Next Big eSports Title?
There’s been a distinct lack of talk about Valorant as an eSports title. However, in an ESPN interview, Riot Games’ Anna Donlon and Joe Ziegler have said the following:
“An esport is something that grows from a game and I think that we’re going into this hoping and wanting this to be an esport- a really big esport if that’s what the community is looking for,”
via ESPN
Anna Donlon continued by saying that she hopes the Valorant eSports scene will be more grassroots. However, there hasn’t been a whole lot of planning regarding this. This isn’t surprising, though, given the game has only just entered Closed Beta. It would be incredibly ballsy to plan to make a popular eSports title from the off.
In other news, Ninjas in Pyjamas are the first eSports Organization to create a professional Valorant roster. Check out who’s made the cut here!
Valorant is currently in a Closed Beta stage with keys being dropped via Twitch streams from partnered content creators. Some of the Gamezo team got lucky and managed to give it a go. Here’s what they thought! For more information on Valorant, here’s the official site.
