Riot Games was unlucky at first, is now the big winner of the Activision Blizzard and Overwatch crisis

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With a delay of 3 years, the shooter Valorant came to China in July 2023 and is celebrating a huge success there. Tencent is one step closer to world domination. Because in China there has been a gap in gaming and e-sports since the crisis at Activision Blizzard. Riot Games and the parent company Tencent have now filled this gap with relish with Valorant.

Why was Riot Games unlucky in the first place?? Riot Games was actually unlucky.

  • China is the largest PC gaming market in the world and also a huge market for e-sports. That’s where Riot actually wanted to go with its shooter Valorant, which was released in the west on June 2, 2020
  • But games that want to appear in China need a license and China has had an anti-gaming climate in “the party” for the past few years: no new games have been approved there for a year and a half from 2021. It was feared that young people had become addicted to gambling and were ruining their eyesight
  • In November 2021, “the party” then announced: The youth of China had been healed, their gambling addiction had been driven out. And so Valorant received the license in December 2022. Valorant was able to start on July 12, 2023: it was a huge success

    • Valorant celebrates the shooter’s most important tournament with an anthem – fans praise the crazy music video

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    Overwatch disappears from China – Valorant fills the gap

    Why is Valorant so successful in China now? The Chinese software giant Tencent (heraldic animal: penguin) and Riot Games are now celebrating a huge success with Valorant in China.

    This is also due to the fact that Activision Blizzard and thus its shooter Overwatch had to withdraw from China at the beginning of 2023 after a crisis with the local partner NetEase arose.

    Overwatch had established itself in China as a shooter and e-sports title in recent years. 3 teams from Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai had bought into the Overwatch League for a lot of money.

    As the analysis company Niko Partners reports, Valorant has now filled a “gap” in the market for PC gamers that Overwatch left behind.

    The penguin is on the rise again.

    Because with the departure of Overwatch, a large e-sports system also collapsed, which Valorant is now entering.

    Tencent plans to invest $138 million in Valorant esports over the next 3 years.

    Riot Games uses LoL to push Valorant in China

    How the launch went: Tencent capitalized on Chinese enthusiasm for League of Legends: the most successful PC game in China.

    Players have been promised exclusive rewards if they connect their LoL account to Valorant.

    Valorant a great success right from the start

    How successful was that now? Tencent says the launch of Valorant in China was the “most successful PC game release” based on launch-day users and the most viewed new game on Huya, China’s Twitch.

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    In the first few weeks, Valorant has already reached 3 times more viewers than the previous shooter favorite in China, Crossfire, according to Niko Partners.

    It’s called. The launch day was so successful that there were queues and server problems. Tencent has publicly announced several times that it will increase capacity.

    A gaming company is bigger than Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft – And their crest is a fucking penguin

    mmod-game