When digging into the new game, especially a multiplayer one, people often are asking about its player count. Because that determines how fast can you find games and how lively the community is. It’s no fun playing the game when there’s only you to talk about it (with exceptions of course). So let’s talk about the Valorant player count and community.
Number of Concurrent Players in Valorant
Even though Valorant is only a little over a year old it is doing very well. The open beta held back in May of 2020 had 3 million concurrent players at some point, but that’s is only an open beta when people were just curious.
In September of 2021, the number of online Valorant players was not even close to CS:GO. And if you didn’t know, CS:GO is a #1 competitive FPS game that’s been around since 2012. Yet, as of March 2022, the numbers have changed. Valorant is very competitive with CS:GO. At this moment, it has even more active players than CS.
The numbers say the following, on March 21, 2022, 5 PM EST (by activeplayer.io):
- Valorant Online Player Count: 503, 816
- CS:GO Online Player Count: 421,869
If you need more examples for comparison, Rainbow Six: Siege had around 60K and Overwatch had 200K players at the same time.
Active Community Members on Social Media
If you are a talkative person and love to interact with fellow community members let’s break down Valorant’s social media numbers. In particular Reddit and Discord because those are the platforms players can engage the most.
Despite the smaller player count, numbers on Reddit are very competitive. We will compare them to the same games as when we compared player count: CS:GO, Rainbow Six: Siege, and Overwatch. We will only work with official subreddits as that is the center of the games’ community.
Let’s start off with the total subreddit users, the Overwatch comes out on top with a massive split subreddit users. All the others are more or less evenly split and are around a million users.
- r/Valorant: 1.1m
- r/GlobalOffensive: 1.4m
- r/Overwatch: 3.6m
- r/Rainbow6: 1.4m
But those numbers aren’t really important, it’s like the number of registered accounts in any game, it can be millions but the game still has only 2,000 concurrent players. This is why let’s see how many of those millions were actually online at that moment.
- r/Valorant: 4.0K
- r/GlobalOffensive: 4.4K
- r/Overwatch: 2.9K
- r/Rainbow6: 2.8K
In the end, you can expect a live and active community on Reddit if you are a frequent Redditor. There are always memes, clips, and news to read that will never leave you bored.
Discord
Now if you are a Discorder, if that name is even a thing I just came up with it, you may face a few obstacles. And not because the Discord servers are dead, quite the opposite.
Discord now is a mainstream communication tool, so players obviously hop in on every server they can but the servers have limits. Official Valorant server is at a max capacity of 800K users at the moment and there isn’t really a way around it.
- Valorant: 271,055 Online / 800,000 Members (Capped)
- CS:GO: 41,419 Online / 179,873 Members
- Rainbow 6: 149,243 Online / 590,826 Members
- Overwatch: 74,924 Online / 256,836 Members
When it comes to Discord Valorant wins again. There are a lot of active channels for you to jump into if you manage to get into the server first. And with those positive community developments, we can be confident about Valorant’s bright future.
How Fast is the Matchmaking?
The question that you may ask is how long you have to wait to find a game in Valorant. That doesn’t really depend on the player count but still is a relevant question.
In Counter Strike: Global Offensive matchmaking can take a few minutes, which is considered long. In Valorant, most games will be found within 20-30 seconds. If you are a new player and just starting out 5-10 seconds.
In competitive, as you play, you will define your skill rank. It is based not only on your actual rank (For example, Silver 2) but on your overall performance in the game. As you may know, Valorant takes every action you take into account: first blood, skill usage, kill count, etc.
After that, the games will take more time to find as the game will try to match you with equal opponents. The longer wait will bring you a more enjoyable experience.
Note: If you are playing in a premade team with a big rank difference (e.g Bronze 1 and Silver 2) the matchmaking will take more than usual. In my experience, it can take up to 2 minutes to find a competitive match.
Predictions for the Near Future
I think we can all agree that Valorant has a big future. Valorant’s player count numbers aren’t as big but remember that this is a fresh game. Riot Games puts a lot of work behind it and its competitive scene.
When it comes to esports and the competitive scene of Valorant, more and more professional players switch from Counter Strike to Valorant. That helps the game and brings a new audience to it. With the support of famous pros like Shroud, Valorant manages to outperform CS:GO on Twitch which is very cool to see.
The community is wider, larger, and has more support from creators than other games. I found it easier to involve myself in Valorant’s community than for example the Counter Strike’s that felt a bit more hostile and closed (subjective opinion warning). No community is perfect, everywhere you will find someone toxic, including Valorant. But putting that aside, in Valorant, you are bound to have a good time. And that will help Valorant for many years to come.
