Valorant, the free-to-play multiplayer first-person shooter developed and published by Riot Games, whose closed Beta was launched on 7 April 2020, surpassed giants like Fortnite & League of Leagends to grab the top spot as the most watched streamed game for April 2020. As per the report jointly published by StreamElements and Arsenal.gg, Valorant topped the charts with staggering 334 Million Watch Hours in April 2020 leading with a huge margin from second on the list ‘Just Chatting’ with 134.8 Million Watch Hours.
The staggering number can be attributed to a couple of reasons: The obvious one, lockdown. People are stuck inside with nothing to do. Also, the beta key dropping stratergy proved to be a marketing masterstroke that resulted in peak concurrent viewership of 1.7M viewers on the closed beta’s April 7th launch.
Beta key dropping is a unique strategy for the players to get beta code. In order to get the beta code people have to first link their Riot and Twitch accounts. Then watch Valorant streams on Twitch. Streamers enabled to drop codes are marked with the tag “drops enabled”. Key drops are random and streamers have no control over it. This strategy led to the itching players watching more and more Valorant Streams on Twitch resulting in the astonishing hours of watch time.
Since only a select streamers were given the ability to drop codes, this resulted in them soaring the viewership charts. Anomaly topped the viewership chart with around 36 Million Watch Hours. ONSCREEN, Myth, and Sfory were also able to break into the top 10.
