RIOT games is planning to release its 5v5 shooter on mobile by the end of the year, but what do we have to expect from the game?

If you are a PC gamer, you probably heard of RIOT Games. For many and many years, they only had one successful game to the credit, the incredibly famous and popular League Of Legends, with its over 115 million active players worldwide per month.

In 2020, RIOT decided to step up their company and published various other games, announcing even more in the process. One of these games was a 5v5 shooter called Valorant that rapidly became one of the top games of its genre. People loved it since the beginning and some wise players even started making money out of it!

Now RIOT is planning to bring their shooter in the mobile market, after the bittersweet publishing of League Of Legends: Wild Rift, which is struggling to get the upper hand over the already existing mobile’s MOBAs, the great success of Legends Of Runeterra, which has become the best card game on mobile, and the mobile version of TeamFight Tactics.

Getting out of the comfort zone.

Even if RIOT did have some side projects apart from League Of Legends, players didn’t really expect the announcement, in 2019, of Project A, code name of what would grow up to become Valorant.

From what we got to understand, the game’s development started back in 2014, within RIOT’s research and development division. Joe Ziegler has been credited with the initial idea, while many game developers from Valve, CS:GO and League Of Legends joined the team later.

There were two main objectives to achieve. The first one was to create a tactical shooter with a huge e-sport potential, the second one was to make it as accessible as possible to the public. They decided to make it free and to focus on system performance and game stability, rather than graphics or new technologies, in order to create a big player base with an active community, for both people with a good shooting-game’s background and new players of the genre.

Unreal Engine 4 was the perfect choice to develop the game on, as it permitted the team to set very low minimum recommended hardware, giving the possibility even to players with low-rated PCs to enjoy their game. RIOT then focused on setting up their servers to let at least 70% of their players to play at 35 milliseconds, installing them near the major world’s cities and working with internet service providers to set up dedicated connections to those servers.

Winning people’s hearts.

The game was released by RIOT on June 2, 2020. The two sacred monsters Valorant had to face were Valve’s CS:GO and Blizzard’s Overwatch, with two of the biggest player bases between multiplayer games on PC.

It was praised by many as one of the funniest tactical-shooters ever and almost beat the other RIOT’s title League of Legends Twitch.tv’s record when, on its release date, it collected over 1.73 million viewers across its streams. It was then nominated for Best E-Sports Game, Best Multiplayer Game and Best Community Support at The Game Awards 2020.

Nowadays, it has just under 15 million players active per month, with over one million players playing daily games worldwide.

Following the trends.

On June 2, 2021, RIOT Games announced its plans to publish a mobile version of Valorant.

Anna Donlon, Valorant’s executive producer, said: “one of our top goals this first year was to earn the trust and respect of the global FPS community, and to prove to them that VALORANT will always uphold the fundamentals of a truly worthwhile competitive tactical-shooter”

“To see our growing player community recognize and appreciate what we’re trying to do with Valorant is beyond what we could’ve expected and we’re thrilled to soon offer the same competitive Valorant experience to even more global players.”

Taking on the challenge of creating a mobile version of a PC game is never an easy task. Just few non-mobile developers successfully achieved this objective and with nothing really more than one game or two.

In a year and a half RIOT joined the mobile market with three of its games: Wild Rift, the mobile adaptation of League Of Legends, TeamFight Tactics and Legends Of Runeterra. They all have had mixed receptions by the critics: some of them were positive, some of them were not. One thing is certain: none of them has failed. They all have an active player base up to this day and RIOT already announced expansions and new updates for all of them.

The foundations for a new success with Valorant’s mobile version are more than solid.

Leaks and more.

We have no information about the official Valorant Mobile release date. What we know from some leaks is that probably a beta version of the game will be out later this year, spread over different phases and servers. So the release will probably be region-specific in the initial stages and will require pre-registration.

Valorant Mobile will follow the footsteps of PUBG Mobile and Call Of Duty Mobile, hoping to dethrone them as the best mobile shooter on the market. RIOT is expected to provide a different but still enjoyable version of its tactical shooter, giving the players the possibility to explore Valorant’s world, crushing their enemies and winning battle after battle using just their fingertips.

Will Valorant Mobile be the next big thing in mobile gaming? We just have to wait and see.