Diffusion, Populations, and Clusters: “CS:GO” to “Valorant”
References: 1) https://estnn.com/should-csgo-watch-out-for-competition-with-valorant/
2) https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/cs-go-vs-valorant-which-fps-title-will-fit-your-playstyle-best
3) https://www.thegamer.com/valorant-counter-strike-gaming/
4) https://www.pinnacle.com/en/esports-hub/betting-articles/valorant/valorant-vs-csgo-pro-perspective/wlr2wkkrczpxakbg
Since August 21, 2012 CS:GO or more commonly known as “Counter Strike Global Offensive” has been at the top of FPS games. For nearly 8 years, CS:GO has maintained a player count of 1.4 million players playing every single day. Not to mention, CS:GO is one of the most watched/streamed games over on Twitch. For anyone who doesn’t know about “Twitch” well this is the streaming platform to where the matches are live streamed to millions of viewers. Professional play is a dream come true to many aspiring players who wish to play pro. The reality behind this tactical five vs. five game is that it requires an immense amount of time and energy to play at the highest level. Nonetheless, for a game that is eight years old, it’s crazy to see how much success the scene has and continues to have. With new talent being admitted every single year it’s clear that the game has a bright future, and in the eyes of many people it didn’t look like it was going away anytime soon.
Now as much as we all wanted to believe this, it was always just a matter of time before CS:GO became a thing of the past. On March of 2020, the creators of “Legend of Legends” or more commonly known as Riot Games announce their creation of a new era for FPS gaming. They announced “Valorant” – a tactical five vs. five shooter which was a mix of the CS:GO we’ve all come to love, but include their own take on it which had a lot to offer when they introduced “agents”. Agents in Valorant were unique characters that each had their own spells/abilities. Every agent had a different purpose within the game, some where mages which had a purpose to heal or provide utility for your team while others packed a punch or more commonly known as “fraggers”. A fraggers job was to secure opening picks for their team to quickly turn the game from 5 vs. 5 to 5 vs. 4. This was a game like never before seen, and boy did it come out fast and strong.
Apart from just being an overall “good game”, everyone was talking about it. The game was first teased back in March of 2020 and had officially released their beta just two months after. It was clear that Riot Games was wasting no time in trying to establish themselves, and their number one goal was to ensure that Valorant would take over as the titan of FPS gaming. On the first day of open beta, Twitch – which was the streaming site of where the game would be livestreamed had a total of 3.5 million people watching in order to gain “beta codes”. The idea behind this was that every single professional gamer/streamer was given beta codes to hand out to their viewers. Ideally all a viewer had to do to get the game was watch, and hope that they would get one in their inbox. This idea alone broke watch-time records over on Twitch as millions of people were trying every single day to obtain a beta code. If it wasn’t clear by now, Valorant was doing everything they could to become one of the biggest games out there. It was one thing to be a streamer playing the game, but to the average viewer, they wanted nothing more then to play and get a head start at playing the new biggest game.
Apart from this, Valorant began having famous reviews from “IGN” and “Polygon” being known as: “The stripped-down, skill-based shooter that’s only getting started”, and man was this true. Once professional players specifically from CS:GO got their hands on Valorant they began to play and become obsessed with the game. As I mentioned before, CS:GO had a massive professional scene, but just like anything, not everyone can go pro. With the launch of Valorant this was a new start for many former professional pros, and existing ones to essentially jump on the hype train and switch careers. Now while many did stay, so many professional players did indeed switch from CS:GO to Valorant. This alone was the start of the new era of professional play.
That being said, it’s super interesting to see concepts that we’ve learned in class relate to topics like this and explain the reasoning as to why “Valorant” can come in and take over the titan of FPS games. To best explain this, I’ll use my core friend group to which there was six of us, and we all had played CS:GO and actively enjoyed playing it. I can tell you that when Valorant was first introduced, not only were we excited to play, but we were blown away because the gameplay just looked that much better then that of CS:GO. At first a couple of my friends still wanted to play CS:GO, but eventually one by one people began switching games. People switched because literally everyone started to play it. We went from all of us playing CS:GO which was known as the best FPS game to slowly, but surely beginning to leave CS:GO behind and pick up the new FPS shooter known as Valorant. Now while this cluster is apparent within my core friend group, it did eventually stop. To be specific, it didn’t stop within my friend group, but in terms of the world it did. As I did mention before, professional players who were already PRO in CS:GO did give the game a try, but decided not to do anything further with it as they were already playing professional CS:GO. As I had said, for former pros in CS:GO or even aspiring ones, Valorant was a second chance at playing professionally.
In conclusion, it’s safe to say that Valorant has a big and bright future. Now while CS:GO isn’t dead, and well, it’s never going to be, it’s very possible that Valorant will end up over taking the titan as time goes on. Valorant is a fun new game that offers a new feeling to FPS. It’s something players haven’t received in a long time, and I’m sure as time goes on it will just get better and better.