^{Image: Riot Games}

Even VALORANT is doubling down on the Counter-Strike 2 hype.

VALORANT is releasing a new cosmetic bundle that turns a few in-game guns into their real-life counterparts used in Counter-Strike. Named the Black Market bundle, the cosmetics launch on April 12 and even go so far as to turn in-game knives into butterfly knives. It isn’t subtle!

The Black Market bundle notably eschews Valorant’s usual colourful and visually boisterous skin design for more stripped-down and realistic skins echoing real-world weaponry. These weapons are obviously best-known in the gaming world for being part of Counter-Strike’s arsenal, and we don’t suppose that’s a coincidence. Counter-Strike 2 was just announced last month after all, and Riot could be worried about players leaving their game for Valve’s new shooter.

As noted by PC Gamer, the bundle transforms five weapons into Counter-Strike skins:

The Vandal is an AK-47
The Bulldog is a FAMAS
The Marshal is a Scout
The Classic is a Glock-18
The knife is a butterfly knife

Even if you don’t care about the CS:GO comparisons, there’s another reason to pick up the Black Market bundle: its skins change in appearance depending on whether their owner is attacking or defending. Just like Counter-Strike, one might say. That should push a few players towards buying the skins, even if they think the skins look wildly generic by Valorant standards.

Players have been asking for the ability to swap out skins during a match for a while now, but it looks like this is the closest they’re going to get to it. Valorant developer Sean Marino explained on Reddit that this is largely down to performance concerns, as swapping out skins would cause in-game memory costs and load times to balloon up. Marino wrote:

We are already decently strict on how much available memory the game takes up based on our hardware specs. if we raised that requirement, we could cut out a significant number of players who are at the minimum bar for hardware, and that’s not good.

It seems like Riot is still factoring in players with less powerful gaming rigs when developing new content, though that might not be the case for long. Marino admits, “This inevitably will be a thing we have to look into at some point if we wanted to add more content and features to the game.” Still, the company might have to look into slightly bigger content changes now that Counter-Strike 2 is looming on the horizon.