Is Valorant Free to Play? – Answered

Riot Games, famous for one of the most popular and free-to-play MOBA games, League of Legends, has had a strong footing in the competitive FPS field for quite some time. Valorant is a very popular game, make no mistake there. It doesn’t just have a lot of players; on Twitch alone, it’s usually in the Top Five games when it comes to viewership, if that helps you gauge the popularity of the game. Now, if you want to join in on the fun and try out this FPS game that has some similarities with other popular FPS games, you may be wondering if Valorant is Free to Play or not. I’ll gladly help you answer that question below.

How Much Does It Cost to Play Valorant?

You may or may not be surprised to learn that Valorant is absolutely free of charge. Valorant was released back in June 2020, and while the game will certainly remind you of Counter-Strike (namely, CS:GO), there’s a unique twist to the game that manages to draw the audience and also retain it.

The business model of Valorant is similar to the one of League of Legends: Microtransactions for fancy skins, basically. The next question, or rather, a concern that you might have is… is Valorant Pay to Win?

Is Valorant Pay to Win, then?

By definition, no, Valorant is not Pay to Win. There are no mechanics that allow you to gain an advantage over other players by shelling more money into the game than them, unlike with some other games (sadly).

Related: The COD DMZ UAV Bundle is Pay-To-Win And I Exposed it Myself

There are some allegations that some skins are pay-to-win, but I do not see a clear foundation for these accusations. It’s been debated over and over, but it basically boils down to a placebo effect, where players gain more confidence while playing with great and expensive weapon skins, and therefore perform marginally better than they would if they played default skins.

One of the only actual technical problems Valorant players have is their anti-cheat, which installs itself with elevated permissions on your system (at the Kernel level). If you’re okay with that, I hope you’ll have fun with Valorant with hundreds of thousands of other players. If you wanna check out more stuff about Valorant that we have here on Prima, check out How to Get Account Points (AP) in Valorant and What is an Illegal Molly in Valorant. I thank you for stopping by, and have a great day!