While plenty of people will likely move over to Valorant, as someone who's played a bit I think there is still a distinct difference between the two games.
The main thing shared between the two is the feel while shooting. It's hard to explain, but you feel the "weight" of the gun and it's rate of fire really well and it's satisfying when you land shots.
But, the abilities, while not overly broken, does change the feel and strategy considerably. And Valorant maps are really bad in comparison to CSGO. So much useless space, bad angles, etc.
So, while I hope Valorant pushes CS to get better, it's unlikely that the pool of players or viewers will be 1:1. The CS pros moving to Valorant are basically doing so because they either can't have a CS career (Brax, perma ban for match fixing; iBuyPower) or haven't been good enough in a while/never were good enough for a T1 CSGO team.
> The CS pros moving to Valorant are basically doing so because they either can't have a CS career (Brax, perma ban for match fixing; iBuyPower) or haven't been good enough in a while/never were good enough for a T1 CSGO team.
I think it is really early to use this as some sigil for how good the game is or how well it will do as an esport. Of course the first people to move are the ones outside of a current CS contract! Why would you give up your share of multi-million dollar prize pools while the other game is a week and a half old? it isn't necessarily an indictment of Valorant, its just the sensible business choice this early in the game.
I'd like to provide a counter point. As a person coming from Quake 2, I find CS shooting mechanics at the very least annoying. I can't find anything pleasurable in them.
I still played CS but mainly because of the team play it added. Simple, flexible, and enjoyable.
Valorant is already dying. I doubt it will do anything to displace CSGO. If anything the toxic and racist community GabeN has cultivated will do CSGO in before a competitor will best them in gameplay.
> The Internet has been "toxic and racist" since, oh, the first chat room...
In any respectable community, those sorts of people tend to get unceremoniously ejected from the community - from IRC channels to web forums to community-run game servers of old.
Now, games are match-made and game companies are pretty much forced to exercise discretion about what kind of community they want to have playing their game. Personally, I no longer have the patience for losing 30+ minutes of my life to a game that was lost because there's a 3-stack on my team who do nothing but throw, team-kill and think they're the height of comedy because they say offensive things or have a swastika as their profile picture.
Hard to take this seriously considering they had 3 million DAU during the closed beta and it's averaging 100k+ concurrent viewers on Twitch during the day (North America).
The main thing shared between the two is the feel while shooting. It's hard to explain, but you feel the "weight" of the gun and it's rate of fire really well and it's satisfying when you land shots.
But, the abilities, while not overly broken, does change the feel and strategy considerably. And Valorant maps are really bad in comparison to CSGO. So much useless space, bad angles, etc.
So, while I hope Valorant pushes CS to get better, it's unlikely that the pool of players or viewers will be 1:1. The CS pros moving to Valorant are basically doing so because they either can't have a CS career (Brax, perma ban for match fixing; iBuyPower) or haven't been good enough in a while/never were good enough for a T1 CSGO team.