Valorant
APAC Stage 2 Finals
peak rating: 8,000 views
CS2
Semi Finals from Blast Open
peak rating from ohnepixel alone : 120,000 views
So is a Valorant dying? Yes
Valorant vs CS2 viewership
posted in
Valorant Discussion
it's almost as if people naturally see regional leagues as a glorifired qualifier and hence they will not be watching this said qualifier when they can watch the main event later? apples to oranges, different formats, can't just compare two events which happened at the same time. krakow/majors/cologne to masters/champs? that's a good one. not stage 2 vs S tier event
ohnepixels views alone more than entire Valorant community combined. You can't make this up, even on a big event.
Valorant viewership records all time is 400k. The last cs2 major alone had nearly 3 million. There is nothing bait about this, it's the objective truth. Barely even a fifth of the numbers. Asia region carries these numbers btw bc they are notoriously bad at every other FPS.
The last major was their highest ever peak at 2.7mill. valorant highest ever peak is 1.7 mill, as close as any of these data collation sites get, anyway
these values exclude any and all data from cn platforms for both games, given #21 says he estimates about 15 mil cn viewers for the last major as well
emea will not be watching apac. china might watch apac. americas can't watch apac. also doesn't apac have other options outside of twitch to watch their games?
also such viewership is precisely why riot try to go to the ''everything is a tournament'' format for 2027
and it's still just fucking stage 2. it is not a big lan, it is not this massive event with a huge crowd and the best teams in the world. That's like asking yourself why English FA cup gets less viewers than a Champions League game
This argument doesn’t work since Valorant viewership is past its prime while CS2 is in its peak viewership
Dude the game's been out for only 6 fucking years You have no way of knowing whether that was prime Valorant or not because the game isnt dead and it still has another 20 years to build a community as strong as the current cs community Give it time you can judge Valorant then
2024 was prime Valorant and it's very unlikely they reach those viewership numbers again. Viewership was carried by TenZ and Tarik and that was just never going to be sustainable. Reply to this in 20 years if I'm wrong 😂
well who knows there might be a better player than Tenz and a better watch party streamer than tarik you never know as long as the game isn't dead you cant determine what period was the game's prime because it might reach an even bigger prime for example you can't say "2024 was prime donk" that kid has like 10 more years ahead of him he might hit his prime at 22 who knows
let’s be real, this is just wrong. “27 year old game” but esports hadn’t been taken seriously until around the late 2000s. Valorant’s release was the perfect timing to pick up a huge audience and it hasn’t been able to sustain that outside of China. In America it’s just a fad
the point is that the cs audience has been built over 27 years if you ask anyone "do you know counter strike" they'll probably say yes, or at least say they've heard of it. Valorant, on the other hand, isn't nearly as famous, even though it was released at the perfect time for esport the game simply isnt that old yet for example Im 18 and I've known about cs since I was like 8 or something I've never even played it but I still knew what the game was i found out about valorant esport after a year of playing the game which is like 17% of the game's entire lifespan the thing is a lot of people play valorant without even knowing what esport is
do sites like esportscharts even account for asian streaming platforms?
I mean if we even assume they're getting accurate numbers are u not just wrong? I'm staring at 305k peak viewership with 133k avg for Pacific stage 2. Or are u talking about something else?
china has a heat index. it's not neccesarily ''viewership'', it involves some formula with chat activity, subscribers, donations, gifts, subs and all blended in it. riot pull up the numbers thru tencent I believe, but it is not open for us to see.
yeah that's kind of why I asked the question. escharts pulls from sites like soop and chzzk but they don't seem to have anything from bilibili and other Chinese streaming platforms
all of us are basically speculating about viewership. I heard during june that val had like 90-120 mil heat index combined at masters, and cs had a combined heat index of 180-200 mil. so we can just go for some sorta guess. if vct had 8.8 mil in china (cuz riot claimed 9.8 and escharts showed 1 mil), we get like 1 user = 12 units of heat. if we apply this to cs, cs got like 15-16 million. yet heat index is such an absurd mechanic it is just estimating and guessing (and even I am hestitant about the 180-200 mil heat index, just heard it during the major)
I expect the differences between both games to be no more than a couple million in peak viewership (with CS/cs2 leading given longevity). valorant seems to attract a more healthy casual/competitive player base split, so it edges cs out in daily active users/all time peaks (if we assume majority of Chinese players use steam and not some third party client). It's pretty balanced all things considered tbh. Only problem is csheads (which is an odd thing to say, just play both, not that deep) seem to think the game is irrelevant when on the more relevant success metric it's completely bigger
if we talk only about china, then ALL chinese players do not actually have steam, they have perfectworld. And, we can't refer to daily active users/all time peaks because riot and perfectworld do not provide numbers. China is a really interesting even exotic region even to me as a cs fan. They seem to absolutely love niko/donk/m0nesy, and although there are only 2-3 chinese teams who show up to S tier events (tyloo, lynn vision, rare atom), lynn vision's coach GUM actually said that china has a massive pug culture, but none want to go pro. So, apparently china has a massive cs player base, but none of them actually want to go pro
steam china's numbers (this is made in collab with perfect world, so I'm not sure if perfect world themselves have a standalone client different from this) count towards steamcharts do they not? If we assume majority of Chinese players do not use any third party client (which makes sense given it's officially provided) then perfect world numbers are probably not enough to bump dau up to valorant's anyway.
kinda why I wrote all that
they do count, it is not on the level of valorant, but it's still a massive playerbase. It's just functioning a bit differently. Apparently from what GUM said, almost all of these chinese CS players are PUGers, plenty of high elo players there, they just don't wanna go pro. Basically china doesn't have a lot of casual players, they have elo sweats and viewers. And, tracker.gg doesn't see chinese numbers, there is a firewall in place, literally impossible. perfectworld still uses steam, steamdb shows china as well. it's the same API being used. Riot's API for valorant is just inaccessible.
for their CS numbers, id imagine they just query the steam API like any other data display website, which itself aggregates info from both the steam china + global steam client. For their valorant numbers they get them by the number of unique IDs currently active using their valorant tracker overlay app (id imagine). My point is if valorant numbers >> steam china +global steam numbers (based of unique active valorant IDs tracked by tracker.gg ) even _without_seeing valorant's Chinese numbers then that simply tells u the magnitude of difference (~3.7x)
you are comparing CCU to DAU bro. They get the DAU thru just one user with tracker.gg. They pull up Riot's API, it sees all 10 players, and the tracker.gg + 9 other users are counted towards tracker.gg. There is no fucking way tracker.gg has 4.5 to 5.2 mil active users on its own. of course DAU beats CCU, it's 24 hours vs 1 second.
small add cause I stared at tracker.gg for a bit longer:
it's tracks DAU by number of active unique IDs registered on the network (kw: active, as a way of mitigating double counting alts). given that the numbers it tracks for cs coincide (approx.) with steamcharts numbers, they seem like a decent source of truth.
cs has the same API in china and other countries. they are just counted towards steamdb and we don't know how many chinese users are there exactly, we just know they are a part of the game population. can't say the same for riot, just what they say (and well, corporations obviously lie)
alright hold on. They poll the riot API to tell if a player is active or not and then collate that total number. Riot does not have a /totalplayercount, but they collate it after the fact. that's what im trying to say.
address the fact that valorant's china api is an entirely different entity. Tracker.gg doesn't apply there. It's a whole another API. Riot can easily lie with their numbers, and we can't see it. valorant's API is simply different in china
IEM Cologne Major 2026 reached a peak of 2.75 million viewers.
VCT Masters Madrid 2024 reached a peak of 1,687,848 viewers.
CS2 in 2026 is averaging 292,000 viewers compared to Valorant's 141,000.
https://escharts.com/games/valorant
https://esportsinsider.com/2026/06/counter-strike-valorant-viewership-war
https://escharts.com/news/counter-strike-vs-valorant-viewership-cs-leads-early-2026-tactical-fps-esports-metrics
holy shit you're sad, cut this pussy shit or go on over to hltv with the rest of you miserable fucks
normally when people say a game dying, they look to playercount, not shitty viewership. a declining esport scene means naught when a large playerbase is casual, there is just no longer a reason for casuals to watch the esport.
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