Bringing Valorant to Console: How Riot Games Handled the First Xbox and PlayStation Project

A small Australian team was tasked with implementing the largest project in history. This is the story of how just six local developers teamed up with Riot Games to bring the hugely popular tactical shooter Valorant to consoles, the publishing giant’s first-ever PlayStation and Xbox release.

When rumors first emerged about Tac Shooter, a shooter that could compete with Valve’s Counter-Strike, the buzz immediately began to build. Riot Games, the renowned publisher of League of Legends, soon announced its first foray outside the MOBA genre with the aforementioned Tac Shooter game, then known as Project A.

Development of the game began in 2014, and the game was built from scratch with Tac Shooter’s core audience in mind. Naturally, such gamers use a PC – a platform where every frame counts and just milliseconds can make a difference. At this stage, developers didn’t even consider how the game – later known as Valorant – might work on other hardware.

This is where Wargaming comes in. Riot Games acquired the Australian studio, naming it Riot Sydney, and the first assignment was no small feat. Bring Valorant to consoles and do it quickly.

Riot Sydney starts over

Riot Games originally had an office in Sydney, Australia for seven years from 2013 to 2020. The mostly small group oversaw local e-sports ventures such as the Oceanic Pro League before the racetrack and office were shut down in one stroke, affecting all 10 employees.

However, in late 2022, Riot reinvested in the local gaming industry. The developer announced that it had acquired Wargaming Sydney for an undisclosed amount, hiring dozens of experienced employees to “strengthen the LoL, Valorant and technical teams at Riot,” it said in a press release at the time.

Pulling back the curtain two years after the hit news on the Australian scene, game producer Natasha Wolf revealed how the Wargaming crew were immediately thrown in at the deep end for one of Riot’s most important tasks at the time.

Riot’s new Sydney arm was immediately hired to manage the console port of Valorant. Since Riot was a console-first venture, there was no ready-made roadmap, no structure to emulate, and no lessons learned to improve upon. The developers had to start from the very beginning and get everything up and running in a short time.

Acquired in October 2022, Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent bluntly said the target was November 2023, but at that stage they didn’t even have a single “set of developers on the team,” Wolf said during her panel at GCAP 2024 ( Game Connect Asia Pacific), in which Dexerto participated.

Fortunately, the team already had an existing product to look at as Valorant climbed the charts to become one of the most played and watched games on PC. “We already knew what the feature set was,” Wolf continued. “It has to be functionally the same as what we had on PC.”

Solidifying the basics and doing it quite later

Kicking off this massive project was honing in on the key pillars that are absolutely essential to bringing the PC experience to life on Xbox and PlayStation consoles. The must-haves have been largely omitted in order to prioritize what matters most.

One such area that was left on the cutting room floor was text chat. While this is obviously relevant to the PC demographic, as typing is the main method of communication behind voice chat, it wasn’t seen as an absolute pillar of the console experience, at least not by most developers – Wolf admitted that there was certainly disagreement around this choice, but in the end she had to make a firm decision.

“I cut text chat from the feature set,” she explained. “I did some research and realized how much work it would take. I argued against releasing the game at launch on consoles because that was the cost we incurred.

Another unique challenge in the console space, as strange as it may sound, involved game loading screens. On a PC running the Riot client, where they set the rules, they can effectively do whatever they want. However, this does not apply to consoles, as each platform has its own certification requirements that it must meet.

One such requirement is that “there must be no static screens,” as senior software engineer Rory Dungan said during a separate GCAP panel. For example, every PlayStation game must “show a spinner or loading progress bar.”

However, even such a simple-sounding regulation can cause problems. “We have learned that when animations are enabled, the game may hang for a few seconds.” These hangs are enough to fail PlayStation’s certification check, meaning the game cannot run.

Likewise, PlayStation’s rest mode opened up another can of worms. While it’s not something players may actively think about, it has become a focal point for Riot Sydney during the port’s development.

“You would think it would be easy, but a lot of things can happen,” echoed engineering manager Kayla Panozzo. “What happens if I suspend (on PS5), then go to PC and get banned before I go back to console?” While this is an extremely rare scenario, Riot had to make sure it checked even the rarest of situations to get console ports approved for launch.

Wolf shared how, as the project’s producer, she left a six-month window “at the end of development” solely because of “certification requirements” for Xbox and PlayStation. How complicated the process of having a build approved by console giants can be. Some hiccups will need to be fixed, and while fixing these hiccups, new ones may appear. It’s a difficult process to be sure.

Although now that Valorant is available on console and the game is regularly updated on the live service, the launch was just the beginning.

“Console is now as important as PC”

News of the Valorant console port was officially revealed on June 8, 2024 during the Summer Game Fest, and the closed beta period began just a week later. Of course, this moment was a huge “payoff” that “was great for the team,” as Wolf described, but there was still a lot of work left to do.

Success on consoles quickly led to an increase in the number of active players, with Valorant Studio head Anna Donland recently confirming that the game will reach over 35 million monthly players in October 2024. This growth has led to internal changes, so Riot’s global teams must now remember that “the console is just as important as the PC,” Panozzo stressed.

“Why do I have to fix all these console bugs when I have PC bugs?” We need to practice this mindset shift,” she explained.

VALORANT will be released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S

– Closed beta starts on June 14, 2024
– Available in the US, Canada, UK, Europe and Japan (other countries to follow)

– PC and console will NOT have cross-play functionality

Register here
– pic.twitter.com/6JA0bny8WT

— Valorant News (@ValorINTEL) June 7, 2024

However, matching content dumps, bug fixes, and everything else across platforms is much easier said than done. On the PC side, Riot can block new builds whenever they want, given that it’s their client. As mentioned, the certification process is a beast on consoles, and for titles available on the live service, new updates “can take up to a week for Xbox and PlayStation to be approved.”

This may lead to delays or failures as certain changes or additions are delayed until the next update. As you can guess, players often express their frustrations loudly, although Riot takes it on the chin, knowing full well what will happen. Dungan teased: “When players are happy, they play the game. When they’re not happy, they show up on Reddit, so there will be a negative point of view.

However, there are two key workarounds to the lengthy patch certification process. First, there is hotfixing. This can be applied when any game-breaking issues arise, but it cannot be applied to anything significant, such as new skins or map customizations. “No binary changes, so no code or shaders. I just want fixes for critical bugs,” Dungan said.

The second option comes in the longer term as Riot gradually improves its relationships with console manufacturers. “If you build trust with Sony and Microsoft, you can get a fix out quickly,” Panozzo revealed. “Having passed certification several times in a row (fast patch) means you can release a new patch within 24 hours,” which in practice means automatic approval on the appropriate systems.

Now, with console ports thriving and millions of new players actively engaging with the game, has the Sydney team’s mission been accomplished? On the one hand, yes, the small crew has achieved their fevered goal of porting a hugely popular IP to new platforms at lightning speed and can now let things go a bit. But on the other hand, the hard work is just beginning. The next “long-term” goal is to bring some level of parity across consoles and PC.

“We have to line up on the platforms,” Wolf said. “This is long-term work that we intend to do. Right now, if we were to release new social features, we would have to build them twice.” Going forward, they want to synchronize future updates and streamline content pipelines to ensure less duplication of critical work.

There’s no word yet on when the console ports might reach a wider audience in other regions given their current limited scope, nor is there any information on mid-gen refreshes with, say, a performance-improving PS5 Pro patch . But it is clear that the Sydney team and Riot in general treat Valorant as equals on all platforms.