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.
Valorant is among the 44 imported games approved last December by the National Press and Publication Administration, the agency responsible for licensing video games in China, as they gave out the first such batch of licences in 18 months. That was followed by another 27 licences for the domestic release of foreign games handed out in March.
Tencent, which had at least six approved titles in the two batches, is set to bring a few of them to the mainland market this year, including a South Korea-developed PC game, Lost Ark.
“Many of the imported games are not new titles, and they have created a backlog for Tencent due to lack of licences in China,” said Cui Chenyu, a senior analyst at research firm Omdia.
Tencent is facing increased domestic competition from Shanghai-based miHoYo and NetEase. Tencent’s domestic game sales rose 6 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, compared with an 11 per cent jump in overall revenue.
Tencent has said it will invest over 1 billion yuan (US$138 million) to promote product and esports development of Valorant over the next three years.
After Tencent ended its final round of open testing for Valorant in China last week, players expressed excitement about the title, which will directly compete with other FPS titles including Valve Corporation’s CS: GO, Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch and Apex Legends from US-based Electronic Arts.
“I’ve already spent over 2,000 yuan on the testing version,” Liu Jie, a 23-year-old player based in Shanghai, said on Tuesday. “I just hope the domestic game will not have too much content removed compared with the international version.”
