Why Shroud Choosing To Play VALORANT For His Comeback Stream Is Important
As the whole gaming world has been talking about recently, Shroud has made it back to Twitch after a 45-day break from streaming following the shutdown of Mixer. Comeback streams have always been huge - when Dr Disrespect took time off after coming clean on cheating on his wife, his comeback stream hit 388k viewers, and his comeback stream from his permanent Twitch ban recently hit 510k. Shroud said humbly on his first day back that he expected around 200k viewers and pondered if his audience would expect “something huge” from him, knowing that he would be coming back with nothing special but a rebrand and a few new emotes.
So what did he choose to play on his big day? Well, VALORANT, of course! This is actually an incredibly significant decision for several reasons, the first one being that it sets a very big precedent for content from Shroud himself moving forward. Having spent the vast majority of his time over the last few years in battle royale games since retiring from professional Counter-Strike, this is the first time since his brief stint in Rainbow 6 Siege (after he was banned from PUBG for sitting in a cheater’s car) that he has committed to playing a tactical shooter again for a considerable amount of time.
Perhaps even more importantly - Shroud actually achieved far, far higher viewership numbers on his first stream back. His peak viewership crossed 517k viewers, beating even the greater of Dr Disrespect’s two comeback stream records. VALORANT is a game that has been criticised for having inflated viewership numbers during its closed beta phase due to the drops feature that allowed viewers to have the chance to gain access to the game early just by watching streams and having their twitch accounts linked to their Riot accounts. The criticism posited that the incredible viewership that the game achieved in that time period (temporarily beating Fortnite, which has indisputably been the king of Twitch for years now) was artificial and unsustainable - and when the game launched, this criticism was proven to be true to even greater effect than anyone expected.
The game now averages around 70-100k viewers and peaked recently with the FaZe Invitational tournament from the Riot-sponsored Ignition Series hitting 170k on all streams, being the largest individual broadcast in the game to date. That is, until Shroud came along, with half a million people watching just one player, which is an absolutely bonkers feat to achieve.
Both of these factors are important because the perception of VALORANT especially amongst Shroud’s fanbase of old-time CS boys and even newer BR fans is that the game isn’t really built to be huge or last like it was advertised to be. Shroud deciding to openly say that he will primarily be focusing on that game going forward, even admitting to playing it during his long break when he played absolutely no games otherwise, is a huge mark of credibility for the game’s ability to last long term.
In his first stream, his longtime friend Just9n said that early on in the game’s life, although he found it extremely fun, he did not expect it to be easy or fun to watch, but has since come around. As Shroud’s stream settled down to a cool 200k viewers after the initial excitement, this theory was most certainly confirmed. For a game that has been given a lot of criticism for only attracting the attention of “washed up” or “second rate” CS players that could not make it in other titles, or being designed for casual players despite being marketed to hardcore players, arguably the biggest name in competitive FPS history making it his home game for the foreseeable future solidifies it as a game that can be relied on to last and grow still.
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This is much needed good publicity for the game, whose FaZe Invitational numbers have also recently been lauded as a great sign of growth to come. With Shroud playing more and more casual/BR games over the last few years, he has amassed a larger, more casual audience, especially in comparison to his early days streaming as Eclipse in the then-brand-new CS:GO. To see two hundred thousand of those “casual” viewers stick it out for the entire eight hours of his first stream back in an actually very hardcore game was absolutely wonderful to see and very promising for VALORANT’s image and popularity going forward.
Shroud’s comeback stream still fell short of a couple of key records for an individual streamer (not counting esports broadcasts like the LCS which is monstrously massive) on the platform - Ninja’s Fortnite gameplay with Drake still dwarfs Shroud in viewership at 685,000, which is even more impressive considering the platform as a whole was smaller back then, too.
This is probably due to the obvious connection between traditional media (music), as proper A++ list celebrities like Drake command astronomical fanbases that are unfathomable to even the most famous in the gaming world. Regardless, Shroud remains one of the truly elite of the streaming world, proven to be still at the top of his game, and is arguably the single greatest FPS streamer of all time. Even after getting Hiko, Mixwell, ScreaM, the occasional XQC, Ninja, Myth, and TimTheTatman streams, Shroud is the big fish that VALORANT needed the most, and having him should prove monumental for the game moving forward. Also, he looks like Adam Sandler now.
Images via Twitch
