Is Valorant coming to mobile?

Could we see Valorant coming to mobile in future? Only time will tell.

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Mobile gaming is a rapidly growing industry and has seen a surge in popularity, particularly over the past year. According to stats website ‘Statista’, smartphone gaming revenue was estimated at over 63 billion U.S. dollars worldwide in 2020, with revenue from tablet games reaching 13.7 billion U.S. dollars.

Additionally, according to GameAnalytics, in Q1 2020, the number of mobile gamers grew from 1.2 billion people to 1.75 billion per month, marking an increase of 46%. From raw data, it’s no secret now that mobile gaming has become hugely popular, as esports continues to grow as a whole.

The unique factor about mobile gaming is that essentially everyone in the world has a mobile or a smartphone of some sort, and so mobile game players are not limited by a specific age range or target market. 

Anyone from anywhere in the world can download an app and play the game on their smartphone and it is the practicality of this that has made it so popular. Not only is it popular, but there is now a budding competitive scene for it too.

There have been many games and developers in the past who have made the decision to create a mobile adapted version of a video game, such as Fortnite, Call of Duty and PUBG. Out of these video games which already have corresponding and successful franchises with a competitive scene that exists, PUBG Mobile is by far the most popular.

(Image Credit: PUBG Mobile)

As one of the latest tactical shooters to take the gaming scene by storm, Valorant is still in its early days and the competitive scene for PC is still premature. Of course, with the ongoing global pandemic, Valorant and Riot Games have not had the chance to really flood energy into the scene and all tournaments thus far have been hosted online.

But with the rise of popularity of video games and more people playing online in general, as a result of worldwide lockdown regulations, could we see Riot creating a mobile version for Valorant in the future?

The official answer is yes. Riot Games announced on June 2md that Valorant is indeed coming to mobile after long speculation. The new information comes after Riot released a press release, detail9ing the growth of Valorant in its first year of going live. Riot mentioned that Valorant mobile is in the works, but there is currently no other news on its progress. Within the same press release, Riot also confirmed that the game has 14 million active PC players, and wishes to expand upon its reach with a mobile release.

Since its release, mobile UI has been hidden and spotted by a member of the community who posted his unexpected findings on Reddit. After watching the video, it does seem odd that there would be what appears to be a mobile style interface for Valorant despite no official announcement yet.

After all, FPS games do appear to be easier to adapt for mobile gaming as many developers have done so in the past, and FPS games have been a game genre available on the app store for a lot longer than MOBA games have.

Ultimately, we do not know for certain if Riot will give the go ahead for the decision, but if they were to liaise with Chinese tech giants and parent company Tencent, the money, resources, demand and support from the community would already be in place. 

Riot Games have had a massively successful few years and after 2020 marked League of Legends’ 10th Anniversary, we were blessed with the announcements of multiple projects from the company, as well as the release of Valorant on PC.