The PS5 version of Riot Games’ free-to-play first-person tactical hero shooter, Valorant, will not support gyro aiming functionality in order to maintain parity with the Xbox version.
Coleman Palm, Product Management Lead on Valorant, took to Twitter/X to respond to flick stick gyro controls developer Jibb Smart, who expressed his disappointment over the lack of gyro aiming support in the game’s upcoming PS5 version. The Valorant developer clarified that this is not a blind spot for the development team at Riot Games. He pointed out that gyro aiming is not supported at a hardware level on Xbox controllers.
According to Palm, if the studio leaned heavily into gyro aiming being “the way to play” on console, it would be recommending the PS5 version over the Xbox Series X|S version, which isn’t something it wants to do. Though, he did admit that gyro technology works well, especially with ratcheting, flick stick etc.
Later, a Twitter/X user pointed out that gyro aiming is supported in the PS5 versions of may multiplayer titles, such as Call of Duty, The Finals, and Fortnite. Palm responded by saying that he is not opposed to supporting the technology outright. However, the development team wanted to focus innovations on more standard control paradigms out the gate in order to support players on both platforms. He added that there are some folks within the development team at Riot Games who are pretty excited about gyro functionality.
Palm said that he can’t make any promises at this point, and that game development is complicated. Though, he wanted to highlight that there are developers working on Valorant who are looking forward to working with gyro technology. According to him, it just had enough roadblocks that it isn’t where the studio wanted to invest heavily at launch. The developer appears to have implied that fans of gyro aim can expected their aiming method of choice to possibly show up in the PS5 version at some point in the future.
