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Riot Games has revealed the latest Valorant player count numbers at Unreal Fest 2024 in Seattle, saying it now has 35 million monthly players.
Anna Donlon, SVP and Studio Head for Valorant at Riot Games, was speaking on stage at the event.
“Valorant has been on a rocket ship since launch, it’s actually incredibly humbling,” Anna said. “Here we are, four years in, played by over 35m players a month all over the world on all manner of PCs, and now on PlayStation and Xbox bringing major esports tournaments to all corners of the world, and doing awesome music collaborations with folks like Zedd and Grabbitz and so many more.
“We have a team stacked with incredible world-class developers, Unreal developers, where the engine provides them the foundation required to make the very best experiences, and our teams at Riot are working so hard to make Valorant more than just a game, but a meaning part of players’ lives for decades to come.”
“Here we are, four years in, played by over 35 million players a month all over the world on all manner of PCs, and now on PlayStation and Xbox bringing major esports tournaments to all corners of the world, and doing awesome music collaborations with folks like Zedd and Grabbitz and so many more.”
Anna Donlon, Riot Games
Anna also spoke about how Unreal Engine tech helped Riot port Valorant from PC to console.
“Millions of players are playing Valorant on console now and we owe a huge part of that to our relationship with Unreal,” Anna said. “Without Unreal, I don’t think this game would’ve been possible. Unreal knows these platforms, it gives us integrations with console SDKs, rendering implementations, platform native input handling, the engine is already optimised for all the different platforms so we could focus on optimising the game experience.
“We knew Valorant would be PC-first, but [at first] we couldn’t wrap our heads around [launching a tactical shooter on consoles at first].
“Upon launching the game [on PC], to our delight we discovered lots of folks enjoy Valorant. Our player community was global, diverse, young, very demanding, and to be honest, larger than we were expecting. And we started seeing the requests coming in: ‘Val on console when?’
Anna spoke more about bringing Valorant to console with Unreal in the video at the bottom of this article (at around the 1:28:00 mark).
Valorant moving to Unreal Engine 5, Riot hints at ‘new playable experiences’
Anna Donlon, SVP and Studio Head for Valorant at Riot Games, also spoke about how Valorant is currently on Unreal Engine 4.27, and will make the move to UE5.
“We have squeezed literally every ounce of every thing we could get out of UE4,” she said. “So now we make the move to UE5, and that is not an easy feat when your game is a live service game, but it necessary for sure.
“This upgrade is not going to significantly change or look how Valorant performs, at least not right away.
“Maybe our devs are working on something I can’t talk about. Maybe they’re thinking about ways to expand the Valorant universe into new playable experiences. Maybe we feel very fortunate to have everything UE5 can offer at our disposable, and maybe we are super stoked because we chose Unreal for Valorant, we can move our devs and tech around really easily to explore those totally hypothetical new player experiences.”
What is Unreal Fest 2024 and what else was announced there? Fortnite FPS mode and more
Epic Games announced new features coming in Unreal Engine 5.5, with Preview 1 out now.
It also announced that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have burst from the sewers of NYC into Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), with a first-person camera mode also being added as an experimental release to Fortnite.
Epic said it will introduce the ‘Launch Everywhere with Epic’ program on January 1st 2025. This will offer devs ‘a royalty rate reduction from 5% to 3.5% on all platforms and stores for eligible Unreal Engine games published on the Epic Games Store from 2025 onwards’.
Launching in mid-October, Fab will unify the Unreal Engine Marketplace, Sketchfab Store, ArtStation Marketplace and Quixel.com to offer ‘a one-stop shop to discover, share, buy, and sell digital assets on a 88/12 revenue share that puts creators first’.
Epic is also launching a new Epic for Indies hub and more, and said the 2025 Unreal Fest will take place in Orlando, Florida.
Unreal Fest 2024 can be viewed in full here:
There’s more from news from Unreal Fest Seattle 2024 on the Unreal website here.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
