Summit1g explains why he isn’t playing VALORANT right now

Summit1g was on the top of Twitch earlier this month when VALORANT’s closed beta launched. The streamer seemingly reached his personal summit, consistently attracting more than 200,000 viewers on his stream and hitting his all-time high subscription count of over 70,000.

But over the past few days, Summit has diverged from playing the trendy game that’s attracted more viewership early in its life than any other title ever has on Twitch. During his past four streams, Summit has spent a significant amount of time playing Sea of Thieves instead.

While talking to his chat at the beginning of his stream last night, the streamer was conflicted about what game he wanted to play. But after talking to his viewers for a while, he decided to opt against playing VALORANT and instead dedicated his stream to Sea of Thieves. His reasoning was simply that he was itching to play the pirate-themed roleplay game.

As he continued to explain why he wasn’t playing VALORANT, the massively popular newer title, Summit said that he lacked excitement for the tactical shooter because it doesn’t yet have a ranked system.

“It’s a tall order for VALORANT to keep my attention because I’ve played Counter-Strike for so long that that type of game is definitely incredibly fun,” he said. “But it’s kind of like battle royales where I can only play so much of it.”

Once VALORANT has some form of a ranked system, though, Summit expects his competitive nature to take over—assuming that the game’s system is challenging.

While some games like CS:GO haven’t traditionally had in-game ranking systems that encourage competition, Summit believes that having a substantive ranked system the way League of Legends does could be the streaming appeal of VALORANT.

“I’m thinking my competitive side might just come out of me, and depending on how difficult it is… If it’s something that’s actually difficult, and something I’m really going to have to work toward I will be very intrigued,” Summit said. “But if it’s something that I get there pretty quickly pretty easily, yeah, I might lose interest.”

VALORANT is still in closed beta, so there are a lot of features that aren’t yet available for players, including more maps and agents. But among the top things that the game needs is a reward system that keeps the player base engaged and invested, according to Summit.

“I need it to mean something to me like “Top 500 VALORANT,” “Top 200,” whatever the fuck they want to do, it needs to mean something, for me at least,” he said.

In the past month, Summit has streamed 246 hours of VALORANT, but his dedicated airtime to the game has waned recently. The content creator has played 12 hours of Sea of Thieves in the past three days.

There’s no doubt that he’ll be back in the fray when more VALORANT content becomes available. But until then, it seems like Summit will be taking a bit of a break from the game.