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A women’s Valorant esports invitational is returning to London this year: Red Bull Instalock 2025.
It will see four of the world’s best women’s Valorant teams take over the Red Bull Gaming Sphere in Shoreditch for two days of competition across Friday May 2nd (the semi-finals) to Saturday May 3rd 2025 (the grand finals).
G2 Gozen won the first Red Bull Instalock in 2024 (pictured above), as the community questioned mainstream media’s coverage of the women’s tournament.
G2 return for 2025, and will be joined by GiantX, Falcons Vega and FlyQuest Red.
Red Bull Instalock’s unique format returns again for this year, with each team having to use three Duelists, the game’s offensive class.
The tournament is billed as ‘the biggest women’s Valorant Invitational LAN outside of Riot’s official VCT Game Changers series’.
The LAN tournament will be broadcast live from the Red Bull Gaming Sphere in Shoreditch, London, which is also set to host a unique creator exhibition match as part of the event. The tournament will pit ten of the biggest women’s Valorant content creators against each other in a showmatch.
According to a press release and Statista, there are around 40m gamers in the UK, with women making up nearly half (47%) of that number. In 2024, women’s professional gaming tournaments saw over 21.65m hours watched worldwide.
Details on the teams, talent and creators involved in Red Bull Instalock 2025 will be revealed soon. Last year, the likes of Yinsu, Fnatic Meg and others got involved.
The event will be broadcast live on Red Bull’s Twitch and YouTube channels.
The news comes as another Red Bull event, Red Bull Faster, saw Carl Jr win the Trackmania tournament in Milton Keynes last weekend.
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.
