Here’s how you’ll get into the Valorant closed beta, which kicks off today

Right now, Twitch is the key

Riot Games is kicking off the closed beta for Valorant today: their newly revealed hero shooter.

You have access, right? No? Well that’s why I wrote this article!

At the moment, Riot Games is only giving access to players who are actively watching games on Twitch and have linked accounts. The first thing you want to do is head to beta.playvalorant.com and log into your Riot Games account. This is the same account you use to play League of Legends or Runeterra.

Once you’re there, connect your Riot account with Twitch. It takes a few moments, and it’s very easy to do. After that’s done, your next step is to watch streams of the game. At the time of publication Valorant is at 1.7 million views across all streams, so this is going to be very easy to do. You can watch anything on Twitch, just make sure you have the “drops enabled” tag on.

After watching, you could randomly be selected for access to the closed beta by way of a Twitch notification. See the screen above that says “You’re In?” That’s what it’ll look like if you have access. Riot has confirmed that the current list of countries that are eligible includes “Canada, United States, Russia, Turkey, or Europe.”

As a note, Valorant‘s beta progress will not carry over to launch. That launch, mind, will be “summer 2020” as of right now. If you buy “Valorant Points” (read: kind of like Riot Points or premium currency) during the beta, you’ll get all of them back for the main game “plus a 20% bonus” at launch.

Good luck!