**Counter-Strike 2 majors continue to set substantially higher viewership benchmarks than VALORANT’s flagship international events, supporting the strong market consensus against a crossover in 2026.** Recent data from the first half of the year shows CS2 S-tier tournaments generating roughly 205 million hours watched with peaks reaching 1.38 million concurrent viewers, outpacing VALORANT’s corresponding figures of about 130 million hours and peaks around 880,000. The IEM Cologne Major 2026 alone rewrote CS records with a grand final exceeding 2.75 million peak viewers and over 100 million total hours watched—the first CS event to clear that threshold—while concurrent VALORANT Masters events like London peaked near 1.5 million at best. VALORANT has posted steady growth in certain regions and formats but faces consistent shortfalls in average viewership and overall engagement metrics across comparable airtime. These sustained gaps in established audience scale, platform concentration, and historical major performance underpin traders’ assessment that VALORANT is unlikely to lead at any 2026 major.