Tencent to launch hit game Valorant in China as it seeks a domestic successor to League of Legends
- Valorant was launched globally in June 2020, becoming an instant hit with over 14 million players as of July
- Tencent says Valorant is its ‘most important game published this year’ and will be made available to players on the mainland from Wednesday
Tencent Holdings, the world’s largest video games publisher by revenue, is bringing popular shooting game Valorant developed by subsidiary Riot Games to mainland China, three years after its global debut as it seeks to bolster its domestic market position.
Riot Games, which became a subsidiary of Tencent in 2011, is also the developer of League of Legends, a game which underpinned Tencent’s rise as a global gaming power. Tencent said Valorant is its “most important game published this year” and will be made available to players on the mainland from Wednesday.
Valorant was launched globally in June 2020, becoming an instant hit with over 14 million players as of this July, according to data from Tracker Network.
It was also the most-watched first-person shooter (FPS) title on game streaming website Twitch in 2022. However, it had not secured a licence to be published in mainland China until December 2022, when Beijing ended an 18-month freeze on foreign game approvals.
“For a long time, the industry thought growth in the PC game market was slowing down, but the emergence of Valorant made us believe that PC games still have strong growth potential,” Steven Ma Xiaoyi, a senior vice-president at Tencent, said in a press conference held in Shanghai in late June.
