Leo Faria

Thanks for lending your talents to the VCT. Deeply appreciate the great work and partnership.

Wishing you an incredible end of the year and that you spend time with your loved ones.

See you next year!

2024 will be remembered as an incredible season, where we grew, set new records, created new stories, and learned a ton as a community. I hope you’re proud.

In 2025, we’re celebrating our five-year anniversary, a milestone that not every game gets to celebrate, and we can't help but to look back at all the amazing things we’ve accomplished together.

Thank You

We deeply appreciate your passion, time, feedback, and all the energy you put into our sport. There’s no VCT without you.

Add to that the teams’ own revenue sources such as sponsorships, merchandising, and fan membership programs, and you can have an idea of how big the VCT economy is and how the sport is able to offer great opportunities for everyone involved.

Coupled with stipends and prize pools, the VCT shared a grand total of $78.4M with its 44 teams, a staggering number that shows the passion and dedication of our community.

Thriving Economy

The growth of VALORANT this year has also translated into a massive success for esports digital goods. Thanks to you and the millions of players who showed up in droves to buy VCT content in-game, we were able to share $44.3M from digital goods with teams.

Resulting in Florescent being the first Game Changers player to compete at ILs by joining Apeks in VCT EMEA for the 2025 season. Congratulations on the history-making move!

All-in-all, this year showed us great traction toward our mission of opening the doors of our sport and bringing players together. We received reports of multiple Game Changers players trialing out for Challengers and International League teams...

Reaching over 466K peak viewers during the Grand Finals between Brazil’s MIBR and the now 2x champion, Shopify Rebellion.

It was also a great year of progress for Game Changers. Teams battled regionally throughout the year to reach the Game Changers Championship in Berlin, which was expanded to 10 teams and once again broke records...

such as the Radiant Asia Invitational, and the Spotlight Series, which for the first time ever brought mixed-gender rosters to the stage. The first event happened in EMEA during Paris Games Week, with Americas (Dec 6-8) and Pacific (Dec 19-22) to follow.

An Exciting Offseason

This offseason has been busier than ever, with over 30 events happening all over the world. In addition to fan favorites such as Ludwig x Tarik and Red Bull Home Ground, this year saw the introduction of new tournaments...

Affiliate teams, two-way player contracts, consolidated leagues to increase talent and viewership density, a new promo/relo mechanism that allows Ascension teams to defend their slots at ILs, and academy teams bringing new job opportunities and larger fan bases to Challengers.

That’s why we continue to invest millions annually in Challengers and have implemented a number of improvements to enhance both the viewing and competitive experience, including year-round competitions (no more long breaks)...

While that’s inherent for a sport as competitive as VALORANT, we acknowledge that there’s still work to be done to make the environment as healthy as possible while you’re giving it a shot to go pro.

Access leagues are challenging, mainly due to the sheer number of teams and players fighting for a spot at the top. Competition is fierce, slots are rare, and there’s no margin for error.

Cases like Sin Prisa and Team Heretics show us that great players will find their way to the top and can do that relatively quickly. The players from Sin Prisa were competing in the contender division of Premier in April of this year, and won Ascension in September.

johnqt led Sentinels to the Masters Madrid title; and of course, Los Niños from Team Heretics, with four incredible players who came from Challengers across EMEA, got together under the Spanish banner and made magic at Champions.

Some of these teams and players went on to become some of the most competitive in our sport. DRG made it to Masters Shanghai; G2 made it to VCT Americas Grand Finals, Masters Shanghai, and Champions Seoul...

But promoting as a 5-stack is just one way to do it; some players use Challengers as a stage to showcase their skills and move on individually. Over 60 players competing at ILs this year (38% across all leagues) were playing in Challengers in 2023.

In 2024 we saw over 40 teams qualifying from Premier into Challengers, three of which went all the way through Ascension, and one, Sin Prisa Gaming from Korea, punched their card to VCT Pacific in 2025.

Fresh New Talent

It was also a remarkable year for emerging talent in the VCT. Challengers, designed to develop the next generation of talent for our sport, measures its success by looking at the influx of new players and teams into the top-tiers of competition, and how fast they can get there.

Champions Seoul was the most successful VCT event to date, reaching 9.13M peak viewers and 44.38M unique viewers during Grand Finals, over 5x the viewership of Champs LA the year before. Chinese fans made up a good portion of the viewership, and the event may hold the high-water mark for some time.

EDG and Team Heretics then proceeded to give us one of the best series in VCT history, going the distance with five maps, with China taking the trophy and crowning ZmjjKK the first-ever VALORANT Champions MVP, an incredible feat on the debut year of the league.

It was a beautiful collision of all things VALORANT – game, sport, community, and culture. You could call it a supernova (wink).

Grand Finals capped the event with our most ambitious opening ceremony yet, taking fans on a journey through a year of VALORANT, celebrating Clove, Abyss, Vyse, and the launch on console.

The top 4 teams in the world – EDG, Team Heretics, Leviatán, and Sentinels – made it to the big stage at the brand-new Inspire Arena to play in front of a large and awesome crowd.

Last but certainly not least, the season finale brought us to the birthplace of esports, home to VCT Pacific and some of the world’s most passionate fans. We kicked things off with the best 16 teams in the world at the COEX, in the heart of Seoul, complete with a dope fan fest and PC bangs takeover.