CS:GO viewership suffering after VALORANT hype on Twitch

VALORANT is attracting significant amounts of views after it introduced the closed beta key drop system exclusive to Twitch. A lot of streamers likewise received access to VALORANT so that they could stream the in-game experience before its official release. Of these streamers, foremost among them is summit1g. The 32-year-old streamer originally rose to fame while playing CS:GO. Now he’s playing VALORANT and attracting sizable viewership audiences.

The overabundance of tournaments

CS:GO has steadily been on a decline of viewership despite the increase in number of hours streamed. Many pros have come forward to agree with the cause behind this: over-saturation of tournaments. The reason for this is that CS:GO simply isn’t a good game for content creators.

Summit1g spoke out recently regarding how tournaments have ruined viewership for games like CS:GO. He then issued a word of warning via Twitter to Riot. He suggested that they not let tournaments ruin the category of Valorant given the ongoing 100Thieves Invitational. Tournaments have saturated the viewership of CS:GO to the point that the top 5 CS:GO channels are solely tournaments. He now feels that CS:GO is a ruined category on Twitch overrun with tournaments and lacks an effective balance of content creators.

Riot seems to know a thing or two about maintaining balance between content creators and tournaments. Simply look to League of Legends as an example. It has insane watch-times and play-times. But will this balance still work out for VALORANT’s style of gameplay? Time will tell.

Ryan Goodrich

Ryan has been writing since long before he could even write. He's written resumes, software user guides, consumer electronic reviews, and myriad web content spanning a variety of industries. But now he's writing about video games, which is much more interesting.

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