Riot Games has set the opening ceremony lineup for its “Valorant” Champions tour finale, including Odetari and Lay Bankz performing recent release “Run!,” and revealed plans to drop a “Best of Valorant” album later this month.
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Set on a near-future Earth, free-to-play 5v5 character-based tactical shooter “Valorant” allows players to choose from a global cast of agents, all hailing from a real-world location and culture. Each agent brings a unique set of tactical abilities they can use to gather information, fortify locations, scout for enemy intel, breach defensive sites, control territory, and more. Abilities create unique tactical opportunities for players to take the right shot.
The grand finale for this year’s “Valorant” Champions, Riot Games’ global tournament that concludes the “Valorant” competitive season, will take place on Aug. 25 at the Inspire Arena in Incheon, South Korea. The finals annually feature an opening ceremony with performances from artists who “embody the unique VAL spirit,” per Riot. This year, the lineup includes (in consecutive order):
- “2 Worlds” – Madge (performing live). The single was used in the trailer introducing Clove, the most recent “Valorant” agent
- “Run!” – Odetari (performing live) & Lay Bankz (pre-recorded performance)
- “Superpower” – Julie & Natty of Kiss Of Life and Mark Tuan (performing live). The song serves as the 2024 “Valorant “Champions Anthem. Since its release on July 23, the single has already amassed nearly 3 million YouTube views and close to 2.5 million Spotify streams.
Following the finals, Riot Games Music will launch a “Best of Valorant” album Aug. 28. The current track list for that project includes the following songs:
- SUPERPOWER! – Kiss of Life & Mark Tuan
- 2WORLDS – Madge
- UNDEFEATED – XG
- Villain (Take the Shot) – Barnes Courtney
- RENEGADE – 99GOD
- Ticking Away (2023) – Grabbitz & bbno$
- one (2023) – ericdoa
- Die For You (2021) – Grabbitz
- Fire Again (2022) – Ashnikko
- Casa de Vidro (2022) – Victor Pozas, Moonsailor, Bia Caboz
Previous artists featured in collaborations between “Valorant” and Riot Games Music include Zedd, Ashnikko, Grabbitz, bbno$, ericdoa, Emei, Jazz Alonso, eaJ, Dabin and Ylona Garcia.
According to Riot Games, “Valorant” players are some of the biggest music fans in gaming, with a second-quarter 2024 consumer survey revealing that the game’s players “spend more time listening to music than most other key titles in the gaming industry.”
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Riot prides itself on its strategy to manage the relationship between music and gaming by working with emerging artists through its Riot Games Music division, which has been ramping up its collaborations, IP expansion and live events offerings in recent years. And with the launch of “Valorant” on console systems including PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S earlier this month , Riot was looking for a big way to introduce its larger audience to the game’s community through its music.
“Consoles are brand new for us. We’ve been building this community within the PC player base globally And we’ve made a lot of music and some of these songs, really have become big parts of people’s lives,” Riot Games Music lead music supervisor Jonny Altepeter told Variety . “Like our first VCT anthem by Grabbitz, it’s called ‘Die for You,’ within the ‘Valorant’ catalog, it’s a classic at this point — which is funny to say, because the game’s only four years old. But it is, and we always come back to it and the sentiment around that song is just always so positive. And so when we were entering console world and expanding to these new players, we wanted to figure out how we could bring them into our world deeper. And we thought this compilation album would be a good way to do that, and say, this is a new IP, this is a new game, this is a new world for you — but there’s this rich history here that we’d love to bring you into as well.”
Altepeter and Riot Games head of music and events Maria Egan are teasing big plans for Riot Games Music’s collaborations next year, on the heels of major success with this year’s live music events surrounding “Valorant”: the “Brownies & VALORADE” event at the Bellwether in Los Angeles on Aug. 23 (which sold out tickets in less than one minute) and a “Valorant” Rave event promoting the Valorant Champions Tour Masters in Shanghai June 7-8.
“There’s this phrase I love, which is, wherever there’s music, there’s memories,” Egan said. “And so if our music efforts around ‘Valorant’ allow our players to form these memories of these high peak moments in their life, whether that’s the rave in Shanghai –which the feedback we got from that was like 99% positive sentiment, which is impossible to get, like one of the greatest live experiences in Shanghai that year — these become peak experiences for our players. And my team doesn’t make the game, but we create a lot of the experiences around the game. And if those experiences can cement their time as part of the ‘Valorant’ community and their memory for the rest of their lives, that’s huge.”
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