When did VALORANT come out?

The closed beta came first

The closed beta ran from April 6, 2020 to May 29, 2020 — 53 days. Access was granted through Twitch drops rather than sign-ups, which meant watching VALORANT streams for a chance at an invite, and it turned the beta into one of the most-watched events the platform had seen.

That distribution choice did more for the game's launch than the beta itself did. Tying entry to viewership meant the audience assembled before the playerbase did, and the game arrived in June already having an established competitive scene watching it.

The beta was not a demo of a finished game. Agents were rebalanced heavily during it, the economy was reworked, and several things players now treat as fundamental — including how much a full buy costs — settled during those weeks rather than before them.

There is a small discrepancy worth flagging: the game's own files date the first act's asset to June 1, 2020, while the public launch was June 2, 2020. Both are correct. The act asset goes live before the servers open to everyone, which is why a file-derived date and a press-release date differ by a day.

Every platform, and when it arrived

VALORANT launched as a Windows-only game and has expanded carefully since. The full picture as it stands:

Windows PC — at launch

The original and still the primary platform. It requires the Riot Client and Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat, which runs at kernel level and is the reason the game does not run under emulation or on unsupported systems.

PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S — 2024

The console version arrived four years after PC, first in a limited beta and then generally. It is a separate playerbase: there is no crossplay between console and PC, because aim assist and mouse input cannot share a competitive queue fairly.

Mobile — announced, not released

Riot announced a mobile version early in the game's life and has shown it publicly in some regions, but there is no global release. Anything presenting a firm worldwide date is guessing.

macOS — not supported

There is no Mac version and no supported workaround. Vanguard requires Windows kernel access, which rules out every virtualisation and compatibility layer, including Boot Camp on Apple silicon.

Linux and Steam Deck — not supported

Same reason. Proton and Wine cannot satisfy Vanguard's requirements, and Riot has been explicit that this is deliberate rather than a gap waiting to be filled.

The Mac situation comes up often enough that it has its own page — can you play VALORANT on Maccovers the workarounds people try and why none of them work.

Which agents were there at launch

5 agents shipped with the game. Those launch agents were Sova, Phoenix, Brimstone, Sage, Jett, and the roster now stands at 29 — so the overwhelming majority of the cast arrived after release.

You can see the difference in how they play. The launch agents have comparatively simple kits — a smoke, a flash, a heal, a recon dart — because they had to teach the game as well as be played in it. The agents added since lean far more heavily on conditional and setup-dependent abilities, which is only reasonable once the audience already understands the fundamentals.

Riot has never published individual agent release dates in the game files. The season assets date acts precisely, but agents carry an empty release field, which is why agent-by-agent timelines elsewhere are assembled from patch notes rather than read from the game — and why we do not print one here rather than guess at it.

The current roster, with every ability, is on the agents page.

What VALORANT arrived into

The timing mattered as much as the game. VALORANT launched in June 2020, into a year when a great many people were at home and looking for something to play with friends, and into a tactical shooter market that had been effectively uncontested for the best part of a decade.

Counter-Strike had held that space almost alone. VALORANT's pitch was that genre's economy and precision combined with abilities from a hero shooter, which sounded to many people at the time like it would satisfy neither audience. The bet was that the two could be balanced against each other rather than diluting one another.

The other half of the pitch was infrastructure. Riot committed to 128-tick servers and a kernel-level anti-cheat from day one, both direct responses to long-standing complaints in the genre. Vanguard remains the most contested decision the game has made, and it is also the reason the platform list above is as short as it is.

Five years on, the structural choices have held. The economy, the round format and the act cycle are recognisably the same as at launch, and the changes since have been additive — more agents, more maps, more modes — rather than corrective.

The modes have grown too

At launch the game was essentially one thing: a five-versus-five, thirteen-round match with an economy. Unrated was there from the start, and ranked competitive arrived shortly afterwards once Riot had enough data to seed a ladder.

Everything else has been added since. Deathmatch gave players a way to warm up aim without the round structure. Spike Rush compressed the format into something that finishes in under ten minutes. Team Deathmatch and Swiftplay came later still, both aimed at the same problem — that a full match is a forty-minute commitment and not everybody has forty minutes.

Premier is the most substantial addition, and it is a different kind of thing entirely: a structured team competition with a season, a schedule and a route into the official esports pyramid. It exists because the gap between ranked solo queue and professional play had nothing in it.

Alongside those, Riot runs limited-time modes that appear for a period and then leave. They rotate rather than accumulate, which keeps the mode list from growing to the point where the queues split the playerbase too thinly to matchmake well.

Why published VALORANT dates disagree

If you compare release dates and act dates across sites, you will find they differ, sometimes by several days. There are three separate reasons, and it is worth knowing which is which.

The first is time zones. Riot's season assets are stamped in UTC, and a site publishing in local time will move a date by a day in either direction. The second is the asset-versus-announcement gap covered above: files go live before servers do. The third, and the largest, is that most timelines are reconstructed by reading patch notes and counting forward, which accumulates error the further back you go.

This page takes its dates from the season assets directly and states them in UTC, which sidesteps the third problem entirely and makes the first two explicit rather than silent. Where the files and the public record genuinely disagree, both are shown. The data behind it is re-read twice a day, so a date here does not go stale between edits the way a hand-maintained timeline does — which is the other quiet source of error in published VALORANT chronologies, and the hardest one to spot from the outside.

The competitive scene arrived almost immediately

One of the more unusual things about VALORANT's release is how quickly organised competition followed it. Most games take years to build an esports ecosystem; VALORANT had third-party tournaments running within weeks of launch, largely because the audience assembled during the closed beta was already a competitive one.

Riot formalised that into an official circuit the following year, with regional leagues feeding international events and an annual championship at the top. The structure has been reorganised more than once since — partnered teams, regional leagues and the route from open qualifiers have all changed shape — but the annual rhythm of regional play building to a world championship has held throughout.

That scene is the reason a lot of the data on this site exists. Professional players publish their settings and crosshair codes, which is what makes them comparable across a playerbase, and the competitive calendar is what gives the act cycle its significance beyond a rank reset.

If you came here from a professional match, our pro settings databasehas the settings and crosshairs of several hundred of them.