Co-developed by Tencent’s Riot Games and Lightspeed Studios, Valorant Mobile is available only in China so far, with no clear launch date for global markets. — Riot Games
Tencent Holdings Ltd’s Valorant made a strong debut on mobile this week, earning US$1mil (RM4.22mil) in gross player spending on iPhones on its first day out in China.
The colourful shooting game, first released on PC in 2020, is one of Tencent’s big mobile launches this year, closely watched as an indicator of the company’s strategy to sustain what it calls evergreen franchises. It had roughly 170,000 downloads on day one, about as many as Tencent’s DnF Mobile a year earlier, and remains No.1 in downloads among all iPhone apps, according to Appfigures data.
Co-developed by Tencent’s Riot Games and Lightspeed Studios, Valorant Mobile is available only in China so far, with no clear launch date for global markets. The game is free to play, with in-app purchases and character cosmetics making up the revenue. That’s the same monetisation method as DnF Mobile, though that game earned roughly five times as much on its release, whereas Valorant is currently sixth on the charts for highest-earning games, Appfigures said.
"It’s within expectations. Tencent is probably playing the long game and not rushing to monetise up front,” said Zeng Xiaofeng, vice president at market researcher Niko Partners.
Tencent is a global leader in shooting games, having previously adapted Call Of Duty to smartphones. Its executives have said they aim to offer a diverse range of options to gamers, though it remains an open question whether these games will cannibalise each other. On mobile alone, Tencent runs shooting franchises including PUBG Mobile, CrossFire, and its in-house Delta Force and Arena Breakout.
The company said last week that Valorant Mobile attracted more than 70 million pre-registrations across all platforms. Appfigures does not track spending and downloads on Android, which has several app stores in China.
The original Valorant PC game is known for its unforgiving speed, where players can be eliminated very quickly. It remains to be seen whether such gameplay will be as much of a hit on smartphones, where touch controls make precision more difficult. Last year, one of Tencent’s studios tested Ace Force 2, a mobile game with similar gameplay to Valorant, but the title was shut down soon after launch. – Bloomberg
