Riot Games' Valorant server architecture informs live sports technology

Riot Games has implemented high-performance server architecture for its shooter game, Valorant, to ensure match outcomes are determined by player skill rather than network latency. To achieve this, the company operates servers at 128 ticks per second and utilizes its own internet backbone, Riot Direct, aiming to provide a round-trip ping of 35 milliseconds or less to 70% of its player base.

The engineering principles used in multiplayer gaming, such as server-authoritative models, tick rates, and rollback netcode, are increasingly being applied to live sports platforms. Both industries face the challenge of keeping millions of clients synchronized with a single, rapidly changing state over uncontrolled networks. By borrowing concepts like sub-tick timestamps and latency management, developers of sports applications can better handle real-time data updates and event sequencing.