Riot Games bans third-party apps on Valorant

The well-known program Recon Bolt, which allows the installation of a specific character during the selection stage, will disappear from all stores and will become unavailable for use. This was written by developer Julian Dunskus on his Discord channel.

What is Recon Bolt

The program was released in most stores in October 2022 and was designed as a statistics tracker and auxiliary tool for Valorant players. With Recon Bolt, users could view match history and detailed statistics, manage their inventory, track the progress of tasks, search for information about agents and maps, check daily store offers. The last and most popular feature was the ability to instantly select characters during the draft stage. Interestingly, the program's name directly refers to the character Sova and his ability, Recon Bolt, which allows him to scan any location on the map and locate the enemy.

Project closure

On July 20, the developer of Recon Bolt - Julian Dunskus announced on his Discord channel that he had received a warning letter from Riot Games. The letter stated that he should close and remove the program from all stores, as well as delete the page with it on Github. Riot Games gave a week to fulfill all the conditions and threatened with a lawsuit in case of non-compliance.

Remember the bad news 2 months ago? Well, it got worse. I received an official letter from Riot with threats to take me to court if I do not delete the program and its page from GitHub. They gave me a deadline until July 27, and I decided not to drag out this process for a week and do it today. It's hard to describe the disappointment that awaited me this morning, but Riot cut off all attempts on my part to talk about this and find a way to solve the problem. Thank you very much for your support during the program's existence.

Recall that in 2022, Riot Games warned players about the use of third-party programs. The developers stated that such programs collect information about the game client and warned that players who use them will be banned.

Recon Bolt was one of the most popular third-party programs for Valorant, so if it was blocked, we can likely expect a new wave of blockages and refusals from unofficial programs in the future.