I want Valorant to succeed long term, but my main issue right now is name recognition. CSGO has many big names (s1mple, device, etc) and a decent influx of young talent (m0nesy, for example). Also, the dominant CSGO teams manage to stay dominant for long period of time, thus allowing fanbases to grow around both players AND teams.
Now look at Valorant. Our biggest names are ScreaM, TenZ (lol), cNed (unknown prior), nats (unknown prior), and Tarik (who doesn’t even play the game competitively). The game is going to heavily rely on young talent, so we need to see more players like Cryo/zekken/trent. There aren’t enough S-tier tournaments to establish dominant teams. For example, in NA we’ve seen teams like TSM, 100T, and currently SEN dominate for short periods of time before flaming out. EU has similar issues, where it’s hard to judge dominance vs flukes due to lack of tournaments (is Acend really better than Gambit, for example).
i’m out of ideas now so i’ll shut up but hopefully that gets my point across