Hey everyone, Leo here on behalf of the VCT team.
I hope you’re enjoying Champions! With a couple of days off ahead of us, I want to start sharing our plans for the next season of the VCT. Today I’ll focus on Challengers and its goal to develop our sport's next generation of talent.
Our Vision
We aspire to build a sport that, among other things, is the ultimate manifestation of competitive VALORANT. The place to go to watch, learn from, and get inspired by the best VALORANT players on the planet. The sport should be accessible, welcoming of anyone who wants to participate, and have a clear path to pro.
A strong foundation is crucial and will allow the VCT to thrive for many years to come. While our Global Events and International Leagues exist to inspire players and fans, Challenger Leagues and Ascension Tournaments exist for those who aspire to go pro. To complete the picture, Premier will allow every VALORANT player to participate in tournaments and get the thrill of organized play. So that’s the gist of our strategy — inspiration, aspiration, and participation.
My purpose in this blog is to share our philosophy on Tier 2 and provide you with the context behind our decisions. This is something we care deeply about, and are committed to making an effective part of the ecosystem.
How it's going
VCT took a huge step forward in 2023 with the launch of International Leagues, and simultaneously, Challengers has taken on a new identity — testing aspiring teams and pros as they seek their place among the best. As with most things, some aspects worked well, while others need improvement.
What's working
With several organizations joining Challengers, a wealth of talented players, and strong viewership in some regions, we’re encouraged to continue building.
Challenger Leagues saw an exciting mix of established and new teams taking part in competitions, from the likes of G2, Acend, Dplus KIA, and several others. Some of these organizations came close to joining one of our International Leagues as a partner team, and it’s validating to see that they continue to believe in VALORANT and are willing to invest in the sport. That’s in part why we created the guest slot system, and while it’s early to deem it successful, I’m glad to see the positive signs. We’re very excited to see how the three ascended teams, The Guard in Americas, Gentle Mates in EMEA, and Bleed Esports in Pacific, will shake up their respective International Leagues next year.
We were also thrilled to see some of these leagues gaining popularity. The North American league hit a peak viewership of 145K thanks to all the big teams in that league and a large, passionate community. EMEA also has some quite popular leagues, with France hitting a whopping 164K peak viewers, and Spain and Turkey also showing promising growth. In Asia Pacific, to no one’s surprise, Japan is leading the way as the most popular Challenger League in the territory, hitting 160K peak viewers during the first split of the season. Thailand, South Asia, Indonesia, and Korea also showed great potential.
Last but not least, let’s take a look at the pros. Many incredible players are currently competing in Challengers, from Luis “Mited” Gutierrez, to Nathan "nataNk" Bocqueho, to Yusuke “neth” Matsuda. The level of talent in these leagues is impressive. We also saw Game Changers pros playing in Challenger Leagues this year, with Paula "devilasxa" Blanco Martinez, and Lidia "didii" del Moral de la Torre competing for Rebels Gaming in the VALORANT Challengers Spain league. Last but not least, we saw Ilya “something” Petrov, the duelist who has spent his entire professional career playing in the Japanese circuit, joining Paper Rex in March, ahead of the start of the season for VCT Pacific.
These are excellent signs of the system working, encouraging us to keep building and supporting these competitions.
Our focus for next year
While we’re excited about the future of Tier 2, there are a few areas we’re focused on improving as we head into this offseason.
Viewership
To put it simply, some leagues are lagging behind on viewership.
First, Challenger Leagues are running entirely parallel with International Leagues and Global Events. So they’re not only competing for attention but also for air time. We put significant effort into programming these competitions at different hours and different days of the week so there would be as little overlap as possible. But there’s still a lot to watch. Content fatigue is real, and expecting people to watch everything that goes on air is unrealistic. When fans are put in a position to choose one competition over the other, Challenger Leagues inevitably get the short end of the stick.
Now, even though viewership is not how we primarily measure success for Tier 2, it’s something that’s absolutely necessary for it to be viable. Leagues and tournaments need people watching them to be successful. A healthy league with good viewership allows tournament organizers to fund the league's production, and enables teams to monetize and support pros with salaries, benefits, and infrastructure to practice and compete.
But it’s also more than just financial viability. It’s also about giving fans what they want. Viewership is fans’ absolute way to tell us if they care about something. While we’re always listening to what fans are saying, we’re also looking at what they are doing and if they’re tuning in to watch.
Calendar
The second challenge we saw this year was the calendar. We ultimately don’t believe that Challenger teams are getting enough reps, which hinders their ability to develop.
For the many teams that don’t qualify for Ascension tournaments, their season ends in early June. That means more than half of the year without an official tournament to compete in. I said before that I believe that a long offseason is good — it gives pros time to rest, teams time to experiment with new strategies and players, and fans the opportunity to miss the sport. But the current break is too long. We expect to have a good amount of 3rd party tournaments during the offseason, but we understand teams need a longer calendar to justify an entire operation.
An unfortunate reality is that teams in this tier come and go depending on their results and success in Challengers. But that’s the nature of developmental and access leagues in every sport, and something we don’t expect to change. VALORANT is one of the most competitive esports in the world; getting to the top is supposed to be hard. Many will take a shot at ascending, but only the best will succeed.
A Stepping Stone
That leads me to a final but very important point: we don’t see Challengers as a destination, but as a way station to top-tier professional play. It’s a stepping stone, a place for players to hone their skills for the next level, but not a place to "stay."
That’s why from the beginning, we’ve been very clear about the role that Challengers play in our ecosystem — surfacing up-and-coming talent critical for the long-term success of VALORANT, testing teams aspiring to play in the International Leagues.
Changes we are making
With all that said, here’s how we will evolve Challengers next year.
Instead of limiting Challenger Leagues to run from January to June, we will transition to running them year-round, including in the back half of the year when the Tier 1 ecosystem is in the offseason. We hope that will give Challengers space during those months and significantly help viewership. This change will require trade-offs, like not broadcasting the entire early phase of competitions in every stage, but each league will likely take a different approach. We’ll explore creative solutions around these tradeoffs, in this example, it could mean making a clean feed available for creators who might want to host watch parties. In either case, the new calendar will ensure players have continued opportunities to compete and develop their skills.
In the same vein, we will move Challengers Ascension to September, after Champions, so it has its own moment in the spotlight. We believe Ascension is one of the most exciting moments of the year in the VCT, as it’s the culmination of a path to pro journey and has incredibly high stakes. This change will better position it in the calendar and allow it to shine even more.
The second change is related to player mobility. Aiming to see more players moving between the layers of our sport, we’ve decided to allow teams in the International Leagues to build an affiliate relationship with Challenger League teams, as well as create a new player loan system. The new structure will enable teams to exchange players more freely, with the goal of seeing the resources from the top of the pyramid support Tier 2 player development.
That takes me to the third and final evolution, which is Premier. I hope at this point everyone is familiar with it, but in case you’re not, Premier is the new competitive mode in VALORANT that allows players to create teams and compete in weekly tournaments in-game. Those tournaments will eventually qualify teams into Challenger Leagues, creating one clear path to pro that starts in-game.
The fantastic thing about Premier is that it opens the door for anyone eager to go pro. Once you put together a team and sign up for a tournament, all that matters is your performance. Premier is intentionally designed for scale, covering all regions where VALORANT is available. So it will effectively create a wide and robust Tier 3 layer for our sport, with increased frequency of promotions and relegation into Challengers.
We'll continue to evolve
I hope all this context shows our commitment to VALORANT’s Tier 2 and how we’re setting it up for success in the long term.
We’ll share the exact plans and how the leagues will shape up on a regional level in the next few months. I’m sure some of these changes will yield positive results, while others may not hit their mark. The one thing you can be sure of is our willingness to learn, adapt, and evolve. We’ll never truly be done.
We’re looking forward to your thoughts and feedback, and we’ll continue to listen closely to the tournament organizers, teams, and players whose guidance has helped shape the changes we’re making for the next season.
