Valorant Closed Beta—What It’s About And How To Get A Key

Riot Games’ upcoming game Valorant is exploding on Twitch right now. The highly anticipated competitive shooter has just launched it’s first closed beta and people are desperately trying to get in. In this article we will get into everything Valorant, including how to get an invite into the closed beta, when the game launches, and what the game even is.

How to get into the Valorant closed beta

To get into the closed beta, you’ll have to first of all be a very lucky individual. As far as we know, only one person in our Game Enthusiast Discord (click here to join) has gotten an invite thus far. You can get in by watching one of the Valorant closed beta streams on Twitch. Riot Games randomly gives out invite keys to viewers of said streams. Here’s a full rundown of the steps you have to go through:

• Create a Riot Games account here
• Go to Twitch.tv and make an account there by clicking on Register
• Connect the two accounts by going to Twitch Settings, clicking on Connections
• Locate the Riot Games tile and click on Connect
• Sign in with Riot Games account
• Watch whichever Valorant closed beta stream you want and wait to get lucky

The League of Legends developer has already announced the closed beta to be fairly small-scale. So don’t expect to just get in right away; you may not even get a key at all!

How long will the Valorant closed beta be live?

There is no official period of time the Valorant closed beta is scheduled for. Riot Games has however said that it’s going to be ‘short’, stating that they are going to “keep the closed beta as short as we can while getting additional regions online.” Right now those regions are United States, Europe, Canada, Russia, and Turkey.

Valorant open beta and release date

Right now, only the current closed beta has been confirmed by Riot Games, with no indication of an open beta launching between now and the actual release. But seeing as Valorant will be free-to-play, they might want to stress-test their servers before the official launch. To be fair, this is speculation, but we can hope!

Riot Games announced Valorant to be slated for a Summer 2020 release. No specific release date has been given as of writing. In the blogpost linked above they did acknowledge the global COVID-19 pandemic making the ‘logistics’ of releasing the beta in other regions ‘volatile’. The same can probably be said for releasing the actual game, but no indication has been given that the full release is being hindered by the virus.

What is Valorant and why should I care?

Valorant is an upcoming competitive 5v5 character-based tactical shooter developed by Riot Games. Basically, it takes the tactical, precise, skill based shooting of Counter-Strike and combines it with a diverse set of characters with unique abilities in the spirit of Overwatch.

And much like the two games mentioned above, mainstream appeal is a cornerstone of Valorant. It is going to be free-to-play, while selling in-game customization as a business model. It’s quick-paced, accessible, not too graphically violent, or graphically demanding (see requirements below), and also very much eSports-ready.

So why should you care? Because this game has all the ingredients to be a hugely popular hit that gamers are going to talk about for at least the next couple of months to come. I mean, right now it has close to 1,2 million viewers on Twitch, all trying to get an idea of what the hype is about (or to get an invite, of course). The second-biggest game on the streaming platform as of writing this is Final Fantasy VII Remake, with just over 200,000 viewers. In other words, Valorant is dominating Twitch right now and that is probably going to stay that way for a while.