Last weekend's event at Kia Forum in Inglewood sold out in two minutes when tickets were released to the public Kevin Hitt/SBJ
Riot Games brought this year’s Valorant Champions event to its backyard in L.A., and the move paid off for the game publisher with a sellout crowd of 11,500 and strong merchandise sales at Kia Forum in Inglewood. The event, which is the finale for the three-year-old Valorant Champions Tour, had been in Berlin and Istanbul for its first two iterations, and coming stateside allowed L.A.-based Riot to reinforce that there remains an appetite for esports in North America. “Valorant is such a global sport that we want to bring our events to every corner of the globe for a number of reasons,” Leo Faria, Global Head of Valorant Esports, told SBJ. “Because of COVID, the past two years has seen almost all of our events happening in EMEA [Europe, the Middle East, and Africa]. So, this year we really wanted to bring events to other parts of the world.”
A SMASH HIT: The event this past weekend sold out in two minutes after tickets were released to the public. The feel at the venue, which sits adjacent to the under-construction Intuit Dome that will be home to the Clippers, brought back a championship scene reminiscent of 2013, when Riot held its League of Legends World Championship at what is now Crypto.com Arena in downtown L.A. “We could have gone to other arenas, newer arenas but we chose the Forum because of how much it represents to the city,” said Faria. “We did a bunch of things to honor the city of Los Angeles, including launching a map in-game that is based in L.A. and we wanted it to feel super authentic. From the merch side, you probably saw that one of the pieces of merch was a basketball jersey. We really try to bring the culture to life.” That move clearly resonated with fans: Merchandise was 95% sold out by the time a winner was crowned Saturday. Valorant averaged 976,829 viewers on Twitch during the finals (and those are figures without China’s audience due to a lack of transparency). On TikTok, there were just over 1 million views on @ValorantEsports across the three final days on the league’s global account, not inclusive of regional TikTok livestream numbers. “We are humbled and blown away by our fans' support,” John Needham, President of Esports at Riot, told SBJ.
