The newcomer: the launch of VALORANT China

VALORANT was launched globally in 2020, and it was a blast. But for China and Chinese players, it’s a long wait. VALORANT officially got approved on Dec 28th, 2022. And after six months, VALORANT is finally online in China.

Players poured-in

Most online games are quite popular on their first day in China, especially nowadays with a ton of ways to leave an impression on potential players. But for VALORANT it’s another story.

VALORANT launched at 9 am CST on July 12th. Even though it’s Wednesday, long-waited Chinese players rushed into the server as soon as possible. It’s worth mentioning that unlike most Chinese online games, VALORANT Chinese server is a single shard, which means the different players from different places connecting to different nodes can play together. But also since this, the server will be under pressure. At around 13:30 pm, the server became unstable and soon after that the server was taken offline to increase capacity. Similar things happened at 15:30 pm again. Both maintenances took around 30 minutes. It’s hard to imagine Tencent didn’t predict how many players will login but it seemed that the actual number did surpass their expectations.

Cross-over all over the board

League of Legends, Wild Rift, TFT and JinChanChan. Chinese players are already very attached to the games connected to Riot. And at the time when VALORANT launched, the cross-over seemed natural. There are different cross-over options. You can try to get all the in-game items in every game, then connect every account together and finish the task one by one. If you are only keen on the in-game item in VALORANT, you just need to pick one game to connect and finish the task and ta-da! It still remains to see how many players from MOBA will switch or at least try VALORANT. Unlike the Americas or EMEA, tactical shooter is not as popular as MOBA in China, but it also means the potential of the market is huge.

Still lagged but catching-up

The version of the Chinese server is still behind the global server. On July 12th, the game launched in China with 16 heroes, 4 maps and 5 modes, including the newest TDM mode. It‘s not a complete surprise that the Chinese server will be launched with less content, but the Chinese server will catch up soon.

Announced on June 28th by Anna Donlon, the Chinese server will update more frequently to catch up with the global server. The news just came out that the Chinese server will update on July 19th, which is one week after launching.g, The update willto add Yoru, Astra, KAY/O,O and the map Breeze into the game.

Another topic which is discussed by a lot of Chinese players is skins. The current skin linell on sale is Prime Collection 1.0, which was one of the first premium skin lines on the global VALORANT launch.is quite early on sale in global server, and Also, the Ignite Capule is available for purchase. The Prime Collection will be rotated in nine days which means it will stay in the shop for two weeks. It remains to see if that length of time will be changed since there are tons of skins which are still unseen on the Chinese VALORANT server.