[Val] The North American Overpopulation
The first wave of VCT events is already here. The European Valorant scene will still have to wait a couple days for their qualifier, but other regions are ahead of them. North America had their qualifier last week, and it brought us a few surprises.
The qualified teams for the first NA Challengers tournament are:
- Immortals
- Team Envy
- NRG
- Sentinels
- Gen.G Esports
- Luminosity Gaming
- XSET
- Andbox
This scenario is quite different from the one we had in First Strike Europe, where there were teams that didn’t have any sponsor or organization backing them. In fact, many of these NA qualified teams could be considered tier 1 organizations, with successful rosters in different games and spots in franchised leagues. Andbox (NY Excelsior, NY Subliners), Immortals (LA Valiant, mibr), NRG (SF Shock), Envy (Dallas Fuel) or Gen.G (Seoul Dynasty) are good examples.
But many more top notch organizations have failed to qualify for Challengers. That’s the case of Renegades, FaZe Clan, TSM, Cloud9, T1, Dignitas, Complexity or 100 Thieves. None of these teams made it to the main event, and that’s bad news. The North American scene has lured more investment than it can hold. There aren’t enough competitive rosters for 20 organizations. There will be more opportunities for these outcasts to qualify, but after the third Challengers event they’ll need to decide. Do they keep their projects focusing on talent development or do they get rid of these players?
The situation is specially dramatic for T1 and C9. Both had Korean and North American rosters in 2020, but released their Eastern divisions in December. The reason behind this decision is probably a prohibition on having multiple teams in top leagues, as happened in League of Legends with Korean sister teams, Curse Academy (Gravity), C9 Challenger (FlyQuest), Misfits Academy (Mysterious Monkeys) or Dignitas EU (Splyce).
The NA saturation is completely different from the Korean scene that T1 and C9 left, where Damwon is the only top tier organization. These teams still can leave North America and join the fight for the Korean throne, but they’ll need to be fast. The enthusiasm surrounding the NA Valorant scene will probably end in a decentralization similar to the R6 Brazilian (FaZe, NiP, mibr, Liquid) and Eastern (C9, Fnatic, Giants Gaming) leagues.