Gaming

Valorant will have to turn off blood during esports tournaments says Riot Games


Valorant – blood and esports don’t mix (pic: Riot Games)

Every esports tournament for Valorant will have to show sparks instead of blood when you hit someone, just like SNES Mortal Kombat.

Riot Games’ Valorant is on course to be the next big thing in online shooters, but in order to be a worldwide hit it has got to appeal to a lot of very different people.

A long list of community guidelines has been posted in a new blog, detailing measures that esports organisers will have to follow, including making sure blood is switched off.

Although it’s not a realistic military shooter like Counter-Strike, Valorant still features guns and violence – but only enough to earn it a 16 age rating in the UK and a T for Teen in the US.

The blood you see in ordinary matches is very mild by video games standards, appearing for a moment to show injury and then disappearing, but Riot are insisting it be turned off when streaming any kind of esports competition.

‘We want our esport to be as accessible as possible, and that includes ensuring it is also as wide reaching as possible,’ esports director Whalen ‘Magus’ Rozelle told Kotaku.

’By turning off blood, we allow more sponsors and distributors to join the ecosystem, ultimately, creating more accessibility and stability for everyone. Leading up to the Valorant closed beta launch, we met with more than 100 esports organizations, who by and large, also echoed that sentiment.’

It’s all strangely reminiscent of the home conversions of Mortal Kombat back in the 90s, when the Mega Drive version had red blood but Nintendo insisted the SNES version be censored with green.

Rather than green blood though Valorant uses orange sparks of energy, a little like the impacts in Tekken.

The rest of the requirements are all obvious and reasonable, including watching out for hate speech in the chat and not charging spectators to watch.

The strict guidelines are because Riot won’t be organising tournaments itself at first and is leaving that to happen organically, while the game builds up its fanbase worldwide – which is exactly how it handled things with the massively popular League Of Legends.

‘We want to let Valorant grow naturally; we’re not looking to force anything too quickly without knowing what’s best for esports fans’, wrote Rozelle in the blog.

So far the approach seems to be working and Valorant is already the most watched game on Twitch during April, ahead of… League Of Legends.

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