When digging into a new game, especially a multiplayer one, people often ask about its player count. That determines how quickly you can find games and how lively the community is. It’s no fun playing the game when there’s nobody to talk about it (with exceptions, of course). So let’s discuss the Valorant player count and community.
Number of Concurrent Players in Valorant
Even though Valorant is less than 2 years old, it is doing very well. The open beta held back in May 2020 had 3 million concurrent players at some point; however, that was only an open beta when people were just curious.
In September 2021, the number of online Valorant players was not even close to those of CS:GO. As you may know, CS:GO is a #1 competitive FPS game that has been around since 2012. However, as of March 2022, the numbers have shifted; Valorant is now highly competitive with CS:GO and even has more active players than it.
The numbers say the following, on October 22, 2022, 11 PM EST (by activeplayer.io):
- Valorant Online Player Count: 670,240
- CS:GO Online Player Count: 424,031
The numbers have only grown by February 12, 2023 4 PM EST:
- Valorant Online Player Count: 769,299
- CS:GO Online Player Count: 872,523
If you need more examples for comparison, Rainbow Six: Siege had around 60K, and Overwatch had 200K players at the same time.
If you are a talkative person and love to interact with fellow community members, let us break down the game’s social media numbers to learn more about Valorant’s player count and community size. In particular, Reddit and Discord, because these are the platforms where players can engage with the most.
Despite the smaller player count, the 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 is now a mainstream communication tool, so players obviously hop in on every server they can, but the servers have limits. The 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. The size of the active player community in Valorant is impressive. 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 Valorant’s Player Count in 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. It’s just a newer game with revamped and more modern touches, which we’ve tried to capture in our comparison of CS:GO vs Valorant.
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 community, which 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.
For more insights into what makes Valorant such a great game with a massive and growing player count, feel free to check out some of our other articles, such as a review of the best Valorant skins or our beginner’s guide.
