VALORANT player count in 2024 & is it a dead game?

It's been nearly four years since VALORANT launched into the market, offering an alternative to CounterStrike as a more casual tactical shooter that also combined with the hero shooter genre.

To say it's been a success would be putting it lightly, as the game has attracted a considerable audience and esports scene since its inception. But what is the player count currently like for VALORANT, and how popular is it really?

Our only official figures on the VALORANT player count come from a recent press release about the VALORANT Champions Tour for 2024, in which Riot claimed it has over 28 million active players.

Now, we don't know the exact definition they've chosen for the word "active" here, but it likely represents the number of players that log in at least once a month to play the game.

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This number is also close to ActivePlauyer.io's figures, which is a game tracking site. Their numbers aren't official and should be taken with a grain of salt, but in February 2024, VALORANT has just under 24 million monthly players.

We're not sure where ActivePlayer gets its player data and why there's a discrepancy between it and Riot's own numbers, but it is in a similar ballpark.

ActivePlayer also offers some insight into the daily player count, claiming that the last 30 days has seen roughly 6.3 million players each day.

This is down 4% from the previous month, although isn't much to worry about and is within the normal fluctuation range for VALORANT. Whichever way you look at it, there's a lot of people playing VALORANT right now.

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TwitchTracker.com tells us that VALORANT is currently the 4th most-watched game on Twitch. Over the last seven days, it's had an average of 186,00 viewers, with 15.3 million hours watched in the same period.

VALORANT's peak came during its release in April 2020, when it had a total viewership of 1.7 million viewers. The game's popularity seems to have extended well into the streaming world, as content creators and esports streams seem to do extremely well.

It's fair to say that VALORANT is not a dead game considering the current player base data, and it's not likely to approach that status anytime soon. 

Riot's behemoth League of Legends is still going strong over 10 years after release, and with consistent support, there's no reason to believe VALORANT won't continue to attract an audience for potentially just as long.

While the growth seems to have stagnated somewhat over recent months, yo-yoing back and forth in the region of 23-25 million, as more maps, agents, and modes like Premier are released, we'd expect the game to continue growing.