Hello.

First of all! I know this post is very long. There is a TL;DR in the end.

I'm a European player who's been enjoying Valorant immensely for the past half a year. Slowly but steadily I climbed from Silver to Plat and I hope to continue on in the next Episode!

However I've noticed a sad trend during fall. When up until the end of summer there'd always be someone to play with in a group we have, that's not the case anymore. From 15 or so players we had now there's 4 people left, the rest went back to CS or Siege or started playing Warzone or Tarkov.

That's unlucky, but I got curious enough to check the only data I've had available, which is provided by Google based on the amount of interest certain titles generate in the search bar. I want to mention here, I have zero clue on how this data is gathered and processed and I trust it's not manipulated in any meaningful way.

Below is a raw round up of what I've gathered, as described. ["p.p." means percentage points - % in first column minus % in second column, as opposed to % in first column divided by $ in second column).] April - June is 1st April - 30th June, Oct - Dec is 26th Sept - 26th Dec.

I messed up text formatting in the \"change\" column, please kindly disregard.

Presented in the table is a comparison between several countries. I picked those, because they were the largest and therefore had most reliable data for the most part. I do not know anything about Korean, Japanese or Indian gaming scene and about Riot marketing there, so I will not make any comments, I just wanted a point of reference which I hope this gives me.

First comment that I want to make is that obviously with a few exceptions the interest in Valorant compared to CS:GO has died off. This is not surprising, as the hype during beta and launch was high and the "new" factor of new players learning and searching up guides and references influenced the data largely. This is irrelevant, as it doesn't really mess up with any comparisons I want to make.

Second comment I want to make is that Valorant still seems to have debuted extremely strongly in a very oligopolistic genre that is tactical shooters, where there are not many options and pretty much the only game like CS was... CS.

Now to the comparisons. I think I did an okay job filtering out countries where the change in minus was larger than 15 p.p. (red colour). Yellow is between 0 p.p. and -15 p.p., while green is a gain.

You will of course notice how vastly different EU looks in this table. Where NA, Korea, Brazil or India sturdily stand at >50%, in barely any countries in Europe has Valorant retained an advantage in this comparison. Spain and France are at about 50-50 and Italy is going very strong, but the remaining countries edge closer to a 66-33 split. Another thing is the raw difference between periods; many European countries show a 30 p.p. drop (including France which is still doing good), while USA and Canada (and the world altogether) only dropped 10 p.p. Many smaller countries not included, like Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium, Slovenia, Denmark etc. would seem to also fall into this category.

Here I want to point to Germany, Poland, Finland (!!), Russia, which I believe are the countries with a large, established tac shooter culture. I myself being from this zone have noticed how tons of players went to Valorant in 1st half of the year, but pretty much none of them play anymore. Most remaining players are new players, who didn't play CS much or at all.

Map: Percentage of \"Valorant\" search results in a [Valorant]&[CSGO] pair, Google Trends. (26th Sept 2020 - 26th Dec 2020)

Now, before you comment, here's a few potential things I have already considered.

a) CSGO is stronger in EU than USA. - Yes, exactly, this is the point of my post. Beating CSGO in Europe will take more than just existing and it's possible that without action CSGO will actually win a large portion EU back.

b) Hype dropped, of course there are differences. - Yes, I know that, but was hype in Europe larger than in NA and does it explain why NA is blue and EU is red? I think it's irrelevant.

c) Riot knows what they're doing and Google has trash data. - Absolutely, Google data is not perfect at all, but Riot doesn't share theirs. And I'm not here to dispute the company, I'm trying to maybe actually ask whether they have some sort of plan for getting more exposure in Europe.

d) I don't actually know where the difference between Spain, Italy and France and the rest of the continent stems from. No clue.

e) There's tons of players, stop moaning. - Yes! I know and I'm really happy. The only thing that prompted me to post this was noticing how different NA/SA/India is from EU in this regard.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually employed any proper data analysis tools that I would use for, say, a science paper to normalize data, model changes and account for biases/other search phrases. This is a lazy Saturday post that I cooked because things like this are very interesting to me and I don't want Valorant to be ass in Europe in a few months!

TL;DR! The development of interest in Valorant in Europe compared to CSGO has gone way worse than in NA/SA/Asia in the past half a year. In some European countries interest in Valorant dropped by 50% or more. CSGO seems to be much stronger in Europe than elsewhere in the world and this is something that I think Riot should consider for future marketing plans, in fact I'm pretty sure they do, but I still wanted to spark some discussion.

Thank you for reading! :) If anything is not clear or I straight up fucked up and said something stupid feel free to call me out, my brain is still kind of sleepy after all the Christmas food. Hahaha