Available on PC for over four years, Riot Games’ 5v5 tactical first-person shooter is now available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, but not yet in “final” form.

Riot announced on Twitter that the Valorant beta for Sony and Microsoft consoles actually launched on July 26. There have been rumors about this before, but they also mentioned Xbox Game Pass. The tweets give us a lot of information about how Riot Games is testing the game on the console pair (or console trio, since the Xbox Series S has different specs than the Xbox Series X; the only difference with the PlayStation 5 was the Blu-ray drive in the original model).

Console gamers can battle each other, but not PC gamers, so Xbox Series players can only get into a match with PlayStation 5 players, so there’s no full cross-play between the three platforms, but that’s somewhat understandable, as a mouse and keyboard can be a much bigger advantage than a DualSense controller in an FPS. The console open beta is available in the same regions as the limited access trial, according to Riot: the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and Brazil can try out the console port of Valorant. Xbox Game Pass is still somewhat affected: those who subscribe to the Ultimate level of Xbox Game Pass will get access to all characters.

Valorant has been available on PC since June 2, 2020, so it was able to take advantage of the larger player base that the pandemic gave it (of course, the growth of the gaming industry has turned around and is trying to crawl out of it, only people are losing their jobs in droves in the meantime). This is not the case for the console versions, and it remains to be seen how much success Riot’s game will have on the PlayStation 5/Xbox Series duo.

In any case, the bottom line is that the game will have a larger user base, as not everyone who owns a PC also owns a console (although there is some overlap).

Source: Gematsu