Dec 11, 2023

VCT 2023 EOY Letter to the Community

Hi everyone! Leo here on behalf of the VCT team.

We’re quickly approaching the end of 2023, and I’d like to take a moment to recap and celebrate all the great results our community achieved together this year.

Our most successful year yet

It truly was a transformative year for VALORANT esports. After two years of building our foundations, in 2023 we launched the fully-fledged version of the sport. It’s like the VCT came out of beta! We launched 3 brand-new International Leagues with 30 new partnered teams, promoted teams from Challenger Leagues for the first time ever, ran 50+ Game Changers competitions in every corner of the world, hosted 4 unforgettable global events, and brought Premier to life. There’s so much to celebrate…

Our three international leagues accomplished a lot in their first year. VCT Americas became the biggest and most watched esports league in the Americas and bred some of the best players in the game, helping North America finally snag a world championship title in esports. VCT EMEA saw remarkable growth since the beginning of the season and gave us incredible storylines, including an all-star team in FNATIC who came close to winning VCT’s first-ever triple crown. Last but not least, VCT Pacific challenged all expectations by becoming the most successful FPS league in the region and delivered an unforgettable spectacle to fans throughout the year, including an amazing playoff event in Seoul.

It was also a year of broken records at global events. We started 2023 by bringing all partnered teams to São Paulo, Brazil, for LOCK//IN, Riot’s biggest esport event ever in number of participating teams, setting what was then the record for the most-watched VCT event to date with close to 1.5 million peak viewers. From there, we went to Tokyo, where we hosted our first-ever event in Asia and were truly embraced by the Japanese community. Fans set a record for the largest live audience event to date, with over 13,000 attendees per day at Makuhari Messe for the final two days. And finally, we got to Champions.

Champions LA was by far our most ambitious event yet. We went all in, taking over the game, releasing an anthem loved by fans, visiting some of the most iconic venues in the city, and putting on a show that brought together the game, the sport, the community, and the culture of VALORANT. Champions LA was the most-watched VCT event of all time, achieving over 1.8 million peak viewers. In total, we estimate that 9.5 million unique registered fans watched Champions, which is incredibly encouraging and humbling. It was awesome seeing teams from four different regions, representing all three international leagues, in the top 4, really showing the strong competitive parity of our sport. Witnessing Evil Geniuses' journey was special, with highlights including Demon1 winning Champions in his rookie year and Potter making history as the first woman to lead a team to a world championship in esports.

The whole event was a true labor of love to the VALORANT community and made us all very proud. Here’s a sneak peek behind the scenes with the team sharing some of the work that went into bringing the show to life.

After Champions, we jumped into the offseason where teams and partners hosted over 40 events around the world but the year was not yet over. Just a few days ago, we crowned a new Game Changers World Champion in São Paulo, Brazil, as the all-star Shopify Rebellion team, with the incredible MeL and Florescent, took the trophy in one of VALORANT’s most competitive series ever against Team Liquid, breaking our own record of the most watched women’s PC esport event of all time.

We learned a lot this year, made some mistakes, and are thankful for your ongoing feedback. With that in mind, let’s talk about what’s next for the VCT.

^{What’s next}

We’ve been incredibly encouraged by the success of Game Changers so far. The global championship in 2022 was the most-watched women’s esports tournament of all time, and 2023 didn’t disappoint. But building a stage for women to compete is just half of the job; the other half is helping them get to Challengers and International Leagues, moving us closer to our vision of having one single sport where men and women compete together. So in 2024, we’ll begin the next phase of the program. Bespoke Game Changers competitions will continue to exist, but we’ll focus more on upward mobility and reducing friction for women to be picked up by mixed-gender rosters. That will come in the form of rules and policies, such as player loans, the two-way player system, and exceptions for Game Changers players, such as making them exempt from the territory import rule, as a way to facilitate and incentivize organizations to give players the chance they deserve to prove themselves.

On the topic of player development, we’ll also introduce a slew of changes to Challengers next year, aiming to make it more interesting for fans and more sustainable for tournament organizers, teams, and pros. Due to the timing of Ascensions, Challengers leagues ended too early this year, creating a gap and leaving teams with no opportunities to compete. In 2024, we’re implementing a new calendar with competitions year-round, including a healthy break around Ascension, which now happens after Champions. Finally, we’ll start promoting teams from Premier directly into Challengers, creating a path for aspiring pros that starts in-game. Look for more details next year!

As we announced earlier this year, in 2024 we’re expanding the VCT with the launch of our fourth international league, VCT CN. Over the past several months, we’ve been hard at work on the team selection process, just like we did for the first three leagues in 2022, and I’m excited to reveal the ten organizations here that will join the league when it kicks off next year. The group is composed of some of the biggest esports organizations in China, a few of which have a strong history in FPS, and a new crop of teams that see in VALORANT the opportunity to establish themselves in the scene. We’re very eager to see the new league come to life and how these teams will shake up the sport globally!

Another goal for 2024 is to design a season with better progression, where the stakes and scale of competitions increase as we go deeper into the calendar. We loved starting 2023 with a tournament and want to make that an evergreen part of the sport moving forward. Starting on February 16th for Americas, 17th for Pacific, 20th for EMEA, and 22nd for China, each league will host a kickoff tournament to pit their teams against each other to crown a winner and qualify teams for Masters Madrid.

We’re obviously thrilled to bring a global event to Spain for the first time. From March 14th to the 24th, the 8 best teams in the world will meet at the Madrid Arena for the first international event of the season. Masters will feature a fresh new format, starting with a swiss stage and ending with the double-elimination brackets we know and love.

Finally, I’d like to use this opportunity to give you a sneak peek into some of our plans for 2025. We don’t usually talk about things so far in advance, but I want to set some expectations. We’ve always been very intentional about having a healthy offseason that gives pros time to rest, teams time to restructure their rosters, and fans the opportunity to miss the sport. While all that remains true, we don’t believe the calendar is as good as it can be. The current calendar is a bit too tight from February to August and sparse from September to January. Things are either too hot or too cold. While we’re not looking to increase the number of competitions, we want to space them out better, starting the season earlier and ending later in the year, giving us proper breathing time between stages and events. In 2024, we’ll still have a late start, mainly to give new teams in VCT CN time to prepare, but calendar changes will go live in 2025. We’ll share more details next year.

^{Building a sustainable sport}

There was a lot of conversation about the economics of esports this year, so I’d like to close it out on that topic and discuss how things are going in the VCT.

When designing our sport, we made two foundational decisions: to focus on partnership over ownership, and on quality over quantity. We built a few high-caliber leagues and partnered with a reasonable number of teams to create a competitive sport that delivers only the best VALORANT action for fans. And we’re glad to see those decisions paying off. Partner teams have been showing up big time, making investments that are helping us grow the sport and deliver amazing experiences for fans. There are tons of examples to highlight, but some of my favorites include great content like ZETA’s roster announcement video, BBL’s amazing watch parties in Turkey, and exciting events like Sentinel’s recent off-season showmatch.

This focus also allows Riot to make significant investments in esports content. All thanks to fans who showed up in droves to share their passion for esports and support their favorite teams and pros, we’ve been able to provide a very healthy business landscape for teams in our sport. We started the year with a very successful LOCK//IN bundle that shared over $10 million with teams. The Champions collection broke records as the most successful esports bundle in VALORANT’s history, sharing over $22 million with teams. Every partner team received one share, and the teams that made it to Champions received a second share, being further compensated for making it to the biggest stage of the season.

All in all, fans allowed us to share over $33 million from digital items with teams this year, more than 2021 and 2022 combined, and an average of more than $1 million per team. That, coupled with the base stipend and additional incentives provided by Riot, allows organizations to continue to invest in the sport with us.

Pro players have also shared greatly in that success. From the $33 million in digital items shared this year, teams distributed close to $12 million to players and coaches (35% on average). Riot also paid a total of $4.5 million in prize pools, of which over $3 million were distributed to players and coaches (70% on average). That’s all on top of healthy base salaries and benefits, affirming the good prospects of being a VALORANT pro.

All of this leads to something we’re incredibly excited to launch next year: VCT team bundles. For the first time ever, you’ll be able to support your favorite teams in-game with team-branded gun skins and goodies. This is a new space for us, but we’re incredibly bullish about it. Bundles will launch in February, right around the kickoff tournament, and will be available throughout the season. Thanks to the VALORANT development team's hard work, I’m happy to share that every team in the International Leagues will get the full bundle with a gun skin, including the recently promoted Ascension teams. This upholds the philosophy of Ascension and provides all teams with the exact same benefits.

On behalf of all of us at Riot, thank you for making this community amazing. I hope you enjoy the end of the year, spend time with your loved ones, and get ready for an exciting 2024!