Last week, we reported on the rumor that Valorant was coming to consoles soon. Now, we have confirmation, but there’s more.
As shared by Wario64 on Twitter, the Valorant open beta has launched for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. However, it’s the Game Pass subscribers who get the big bonus, as they get all the agents unlocked in the beta, for free.
For those who don’t know, Valorant agents can be unlocked in multiple ways, but once you see how this works out, you’re realize just how good Game Pass subscribers really have it.
First off, you can buy agents outright, for the price of 1,000 Valorant Points. That would be about $ 9.99.
Alternately, you can earn the agents in game, by raising enough of a second in-game currency, called Kingdom Credits, from playing to trade them. Each agent goes for a price of 8,000 Kingdom Credits.
Finally, there are Agent Recruitment Events, and these are likely the way the old players get these new Agents. When a new Agent is released, players can grind XP to unlock the agent for free. Of course, there’s a catch for that too – Agent Recruitment Events only last for one month.
And we know what you’re thinking of next. When you start playing Valorant, you get to play five agents at the onset. There are a total of 22 agents in Valorant right now, and yes, that’s still low compared to their peers. So it’s reasonable to expect that Riot Games will add even more agents in the future.
But then, if you’re a Valorant or Riot Games fan, you would have expected these benefits already. Since Riot Games penned their deal with Microsoft in 2022, Game Pass subscribers could already get all Valorant agents when they linked their Game Pass account with their Riot Games account. And they got that benefit on PC already.
It’s also likely, when Valorant is officially released on Xbox Series X|S, that Game Pass subscribers will get every new agent Day One, at no extra cost. And players with linked Game Pass get 20 % match XP boost, to battle pass and event content. Once again, these are bonuses that Game Pass subscribers already got, after linking their account to their Valorant account and playing on PC.
For the past two weeks we gamers have speculated on the prospects of upcoming live service games like Concord and Marvel Rivals. And since Microsoft announced Game Pass changes, discourse arose once again on the sustainability of the service.
But it’s easy to forget that Microsoft already had deals like this in place, and they just hadn’t had the opportunity to truly capitalize on it. Well, that moment is now, and even as we expect Valorant to compete with Call of Duty for attention and playtime, it’s clear that both will also build a compelling case to subscribe to Game Pass.
