Riot Games Kicks off Valorant Esports Events

Valorant only came out officially a few weeks ago, and while it’s still relatively new, it should come as little surprise that people are really latching onto it – and that Riot Games, the developer, would be eager to capitalize on its success as early as possible. Which is why it should come as little surprise that they’ve just announced their first big Esports event for the game: the Ignition Series.

Much like the game itself, the Ignition Series seems to inspired pretty heavily by Overwatch and its esport series, with multiple events happening all over the world starting this weekend, on the 19th of June.

The first of these events, the Rage Valorant Japan Invitational, appears to be a very standard esports affair: 16 teams will be competing for a fairly small prize pool of 500k yen (which is about 4600 dollars, blame the Japanese government, not Riot Games). Most of those 16 teams haven’t been announced, but we do know that DetonatioN Gaming and Jupiter have invitations.

The G2 Esports Valoratnt Invitational is a bit more exciting. With teams coming from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, territories will be competing for a 15k euro prize. The twist in this particular event is that since teams are separated by region rather than their sponsors, Riot Games is going to do a little “player roulette” – so team captains won’t know what players they’ll be playing with until the day the tournament begins, which will force players to learn to communicate and cooperate on the fly. Nifty idea.

While we know Riot Games is planning an event for North America, and its set to happen between June 26th and the 28th, we don’t have any details about it. But I suspect we’ll learn more about it next week.

Either way, it should give you lots to watch over the weekend.