The PlayStation 5 version of Valorant won’t support gyro aiming, because developer Riot Games doesn’t want to put Xbox players at a disadvantage.
While discussing the tweaks made for the upcoming console versions of the game on X, product management lead Coleman Palm was asked by a follower if the game would support gyro aiming.
“No gyro support for console, no,” he replied. “It’s cool tech though, I also want to play around with it more.”
After a user suggested that gyro aiming is a “blind spot” for some developers even though it’s arguably the most mouse-like way of aiming on a controller, Palm pointed out that it wasn’t an oversight, but a conscious decision.
“Not a blind spot for us [for what it’s worth], but it’s not supported on Xbox controllers natively,” he explained.
“If we leaned super hard into gyro being ‘the way to play’ on console we’d be heavily favoring PS5 over Xbox, which we don’t want to do.
After it was suggested that supporting gyro controls isn’t necessarily favouritism, Palm said that while he agreed in principle the team wanted to focus on making a control system that would support all console players for now.
“Not opposed to supporting it outright,” he explained. “We just wanted to focus innovations on more standard control paradigms out the gate to support players on both platforms. There are some folks internally who are pretty excited about gyro and have been for a while.”
Riot announced during Summer Game Fest that Valorant is coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S later this year.
Players can register now to participate in a closed beta test that will begin on June 14.
