Riot Games announces VALORANT Ignition Series

Riot Games has announced the VALORANT Ignition Series, a partner program which aims to put emphasis on a select number of tournaments each week. Riot Games has partnered with more than 20 esports organisations around the globe to host VALORANT tournaments in their respective markets. The Ignition series will kick off with RAGE x IGNITION, a 16 team invitational with a winner-take-all price pool of 500,000 Yen (approx. £3,700) in Japan and G2 Esports VALORANT Invitational, a unique format with 8 captains which will find out their roster only a day before the event, for Europe. More events will follow the weekend after but have yet to be announced.

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In the announcement Riot once again reaffirmed their goals of wanting to integrate and listen to the community in the creation of VALORANT’s esports scene. “At this early stage, it’s important for the esports scene to grow naturally in a way that will authentically develop talent, players, and stars”, Senior Director of Global Esports Whalen “Magus” Rozelle and VALORANT esports Strategy lead Kasra “Curiouskaz” Jafroodi stated in the announcement.

VALORANT had launched on June 2nd, spawning a multitude of tournaments all around the globe. Recently, voices around the community had been vocal about a lack of direction and oversaturation of those events with no clear direction and insufficient marketing. Immortals First Light, a tournament consisting of most of the best teams in North America such as Gen.G, TSM and Cloud9 had only attracted approximately 7000 concurrent viewers on Twitch. The average viewership for VALORANT as a game on the amazon-owned streaming platform had also been in free fall since the record-setting launch of the game which had required players to connect their Twitch account with their Riot account in order to be whitelisted.

With the Ignition Series, the scene could look forward to more guided experiences, leading them along Riot sanctioned events at least until fall. The remaining partners in this endeavour have yet to be announced.

GGRecon will continue to provide coverage on the upcoming Ignition Series. 

Images via Riot Games