The closed beta program of Valorant was frankly a masterclass in marketing that will inevitably be talked about in a stuff college classroom, somewhere. It focused on Amazon’s Twitch platform; viewers that watched streamers play Valorant would be included in a raffle to gain access to the closed beta. It resulted in a historic number of viewers for the brand new title that readily broke one million, users that finally received access already knew the majority of call-outs and how the pace of gameplay worked, and Riot Games got tons of free advertising.
Granted, many also alleged that it was encouraging view-botting that Riot Games cracked down on, and there was a slew of other shady activities that all circulated the program, but Riot Games maintained communication as they watched the pandemonium from afar.
Twitch themselves is taking a direct stance against streamers abusing the Drops Program, and Riot seems pleased with the stance taken. There has been a litany of streamers that have been repeating previous streams of Valorant for weeks on end with titles such as ’24/7 Drops – Valorant Access Farming‘ and the like. The idea is that the streamers would set a VOD to repeat infinitely of Valorant, allowing users to simply keep the stream on and muting the tab through their system instead of Twitch. The streamers that participated in this ended up with thousands of subs as users figuring it was live, and is thought to be part of the problem of users selling accounts with access to the closed beta of Valorant.
Twitch put out a specific tweet, stating that they’ve updated their Terms of Service to combat this behavior.
📢 We’ve heard concerns about creators continuously streaming VODs while tagging the channel as "Live" to farm Valorant Drops. This harms the integrity of our Drops Program so we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to clarify that cheating any Twitch rewards system is prohibited.
— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) April 28, 2020
The statement ‘this harms the integrity of our Drops Program’ is likely a direct reference to the allegations of these channels being a breeding ground for users farming access to sell. Important to note that these are only allegations, however; at this stage of the event, it’s likely that everyone who wanted into the Valorant closed beta through the Drop Program has already received it, and it’s rather likely that users attempting to sell Valorant accounts are struggling to do so.
The official Valorant Twitter account took no time in retweeting the announcement themselves in a show of solidarity and support to help maintain some form of the integrity of the interesting closed access Drop Program that Twitch is hosting. for Valorant. It’s difficult to deny that this has been a tremendously successful foray into the power of modern marketing tactics, and Twitch and Riot Games joining forces to keep some form of control over the program is a good thing, even if it does come a week or two later than we would have preferred.
