How Much Money Does Valorant Make Riot Games in India?
While Riot Games has been present in India since 2017, the Tencent-owned company only started making its presence felt with Valorant in 2022. The first-person tactical hero shooter has gained a steady fan following since its launch in India in 2020.
Prior to this, the company was satisfied with low-key partnerships for League of Legends streams while its executives tried to finesse unsuspecting one-time journalists like myself to do their job for free. Turns out exploitation is how you continue to be one of the world’s richest game companies, but I digress.
Nonetheless, with that bitter truth out of the way, let’s figure out why Valorant is as popular as it is. Or if you’re just here for the numbers skim to the end.
Valorant’s lack of competition in India (for now)
Aside from being a solid game, Valorant doesn’t have any real competition in India right now. Valve has no India operations for anything, let alone Counter-Strike Global Offensive. PC heavyhitters like Overwatch, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, and Fortnite don’t have proactive publishers for the region either.
Also, the biggest mobile shooter, Battlegrounds Mobile India aka PUBG Mobile has been banned twice, only to return now in a temporary capacity (read: will be banned again if it breaks India data laws on sending Indian player data to China).
And then there’s the aspirational halo around PC. Around one in every three mobile gamers wants to play on the platform. Also, new data suggests greater PC market growth. The latter, I can confirm. Reliable sources in the supply chain tell me every major PC brand saw a roughly 4x spike in gaming hardware sales last year. This was because of a combination of more disposable income and a crypto crash ensuring the right audience was able to get their hands on gaming laptops, GPUs, and processors of choice.
The cost of success that isn’t earned
All of this allowed Riot Games to prosper without really doing too much from the game’s 2020 release date to mid-2022. Granted, it greenlit a few tournaments, but it has done a terrible job managing its tournament organisers.
From the Valorant India Invitational 2022 held by Galaxy Racer which was a case study on how not run an event (at a rumoured INR 20 million price tag no less) to the recent Nodwin tournament that had teams protesting the sheer cost of being a part of it (leading to Nodwin to renegotiate commercials with them), and even alleged view botting from Sky Esports’ effort a year ago, it’s pretty obvious that whoever is running Valorant’s India esports operations is suffering from a serious case of incompetence. No surprise since sources tell me that these deals are managed from Singapore rather than the employees onground in India.
The icing on the cake? An opportunistic Indian web3 company posturing Valorant as a web3 game.
In spite of this, Valorant has been able to grow. To the point where Riot Games deemed it fit to spend money on advertising the game in the country with hoardings and murals from November 2022. There was a snazzy launch for Harbor — its Indian playable character too (rumoured at a cost of INR 15 million) complete with a music concert as well as an India map called Lotus. India is a top 10 Valorant market for Riot Games according to those familiar with the company’s plans. This is why it gets attention, nearly two and a half years after the game’s launch.
Valorant India revenue
So. How much money does Valorant make for Riot Games in India? Well, according to the fine people at Games Gossip India, around USD one million a month. This detail was buried in a video (linked below, from the four minute mark) analysing what to expect from Counter-Strike 2’s India launch.
Sources close to Riot Games have confirmed that this number is indeed accurate, further explaining that the game has about 250,000 to 300,000 players in the country spending about $4 a month. Despite the game being on other services like Xbox Game Pass and storefronts like the Epic Games Store, most of its revenue comes through its own channels and PC client. This means that it doesn’t have to give away any revenues outside of possibly gateway charges, taxes (if any), and transaction fees.
However, this isn’t growing as fast as it should, I’m told. This is partly due to the UPI payment option missing on its own marketplace which is yet to be resolved. The cashless payment option has about 260 million users in India. Players can buy via UPI on third-party sites like Unipin, but it doesn’t seem to work as reliably as it should.
Furthermore, the competition is gearing up to capture the attention of India’s burgeoning esports audience. Counter-Strike 2 is on the horizon and there is renewed interest in Counter-Strike Global Offensive courtesy of the Sky Esports Masters tournament that begins next month.
That event is likely to feature cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar as an ambassador and possible team owner (despite Sky’s CEO’s needlessly secessionist comments recently). Throw in BGMI/PUBG Mobile’s return coupled with Valorant Mobile’s ongoing delays and it’s obvious that Riot Games’ India team has its work cut out.
India, an afterthought?
Is the company up for it? Given how it just got a new country manager this year after a six year gap and still has all of one other employee on rolls, it’s unlikely. Multiple job listings are present on Linkedin but those in the company tell me that the convoluted and bureaucratic hiring process makes it impossible to scale up unlike Krafton or Garena. Both of them were powerhouses, able to execute at whim and pretty much conjure up a mobile esports ecosystem from BGMI/PUBG Mobile and Free Fire respectively.
Plus, a lack of direction or clarity from Riot Games’ Singapore leadership team along with a strategy to make Valorant appear more accessible to casual players, rather than focus on esports doesn’t inspire confidence for its stakeholders — the myriad of tournament organisers and esports professionals in the country.
Naturally, none of them were willing to go on record fearing retribution. The common refrain is that while Riot Games claims that India is important, it’s never quite really walked the talk.
That said, its developers do a fabulous job of representing the market via Harbor and the Lotus India map. It’s just that real support from the esports, business, marketing, and operations side of things is glaringly absent.
It’ll be interesting to see if this continues in the face of real competition. For now though, Riot Games’ India operations are symbolic of where this market lies in its priorities.