VIT Neo: "If we are among the selected partner teams next year, Team Vitality would look to enter Game Changers"

Having qualified for VALORANT Champions despite a difficult end to Stage 2, Team Vitality are now turning their attention to the final competition of the season. After spending most of the year near the top of the standings without managing to secure a title, Team Vitality will be looking to put forward a more convincing performance and make their mark in Shanghai.

Qualified as the region’s fourth seed, the team will face Global Esports in their opening group-stage match. Ahead of the final event of the season, Sheep Esports spoke with Fabien “Neo” Devide, co-founder and CEO of the Hive, to discuss his assessment of the VALORANT division’s performances.

Fabien “Neo” Devide: “Naturally, we’re very happy, because it was one of our main objectives for the year. Obviously, if you look at our Stage 2 performance, you could see the qualification as good news in light of the disappointing performance we delivered in the playoffs. But considering our consistency throughout the year, I think we deserved it, and that is precisely the principle behind qualifying through points. I think we also need to look at our season as a whole. We reached the Stage 1 final, finished top four in London, and placed top eight at the Esports World Cup. Obviously, the way things ended is somewhat disappointing, particularly against teams that had relatively little to lose while we had a great deal at stake. But overall, we’re very happy. We see it as a small warning without any serious consequences, and hopefully it will motivate us to show a better side of ourselves at Champions. Achieving this, still inevitably takes a lot of pressure off our shoulders.

Neo: I think we had an opportunity to win both matches. It came down to small details, shifts in momentum, and the third map. On both occasions, those third maps proved a little more complicated for us. But we felt that we could have won both series. Once again, I think most Tier 1 teams entered Stage 2 with quite a few question marks because the meta changes so drastically. It’s a game with a fairly high degree of volatility. If you look at the teams that finished in the top six at Masters London, we all qualified through points rather than through our respective brackets. That is also part of what makes this game so complex, with rotations and metas that may or may not suit us.

Today, I don’t want to look at things through a defeatist lens and tell ourselves that we are defined by our last two results. I think that, taken as a whole, we are one of the teams that have done the best job of staying the course, and we have been among those least affected by small-scale implosions. A lot of teams completely fell apart along the way. I think that was the case for many Tier 1 teams when facing Tier 2 teams that were coming in at full speed, with a clear objective, a desire to improve, and a desire to prove themselves in the VCT. They were under a different kind of pressure, with different expectations and an upward trajectory, whereas Tier 1 teams have consistently struggled with Stage 2 over the course of what has become an increasingly long season. That is also why I’m excited about next year’s format changes, which I think will bring a breath of fresh air and give us formats that are less forgiving when it comes to managing a group and dealing with the realities of constantly shifting metas.

Overall, it didn’t alarm me too much. We simply need to remain modest and humble and recognize that we qualified through consistency rather than through a peak performance that would have been equally deserving. We’re not going to lie to ourselves about that. But now it is up to us to show that we deserve our place, to represent Europe there, and to prove that we didn’t simply stumble into this spot.

Neo: It’s satisfying in the sense that we have made it to three international events in a single year. That is always very difficult to achieve in VALORANT, once again because of the amount of turnover, so from that perspective, it is satisfying. We also had a somewhat complicated year because we weren’t able to play with our full lineup from the very beginning, with Sayonara (Ștefan Mîtcu) being ineligible until the end of Kickoff [because he was still a minor]. So, at Kickoff, we were already operating below our full potential because we had to deal with the issue of who could practice and who couldn’t. Then, I think that having such an important player in our style of play and overall system also exposed some of the limitations that come with inexperience in the final against Team Heretics.

Of course, winning a title would already have made this an extraordinary year. But we still have one more opportunity with Champions. You never know: there are always surprises and teams that emerge at these events. We have the talent to reach a peak on a particular tournament or meta and potentially compete for the title alongside the biggest teams. For me, the season isn’t over yet. With this status of being an underdog, sometimes that is precisely how the best stories are written. We are somewhat in that position, and we hope to make the most of it and give everything we have.

Neo: In recent years, it has become something of the ultimate shortcut, and perhaps that is also a reflection of the image we have managed to build around the team. Whenever we put together a team or make an ambitious signing, people call us a Super Team. Regardless of the lineup or the players involved, it’s good that people see Team Vitality as an organization capable of attracting that kind of talent and generating that level of attention.

We didn’t see it that way, though. Derke (Nikita Sirmitev) was coming off a difficult season last year, as was most of our group. Sayonara is a rookie, an extremely promising one, admittedly, and someone who had been highly anticipated for a long time, but he was still a very young player who had not competed professionally for almost seven months. Chronicle (Timofey Khromov) is one of the GOATs in the region, so that label is certainly deserved in his case. Jamppi (Elias Olkkonen) and PROFEK (Dawid Święć) were very good players, but with BBL they had always been just one step, or one match, away from international events the previous year.

So yes, on paper, we had some recognizable names, but we didn’t have the feeling that this was a Super Team. Perhaps it was a Super Team in terms of the level of attention surrounding our recruitment, because these were some of the biggest attractions of the offseason. That may be why observers chose to call it that. From our perspective, however, it was a team assembled primarily to address the specific role requirements and leadership needs that we had. And I think the 2025 project looked much more like a Super Team than this year’s roster.

Neo: We have a very particular relationship with China because, for several years now, we have felt a great deal of support and goodwill from Chinese fans. Obviously, that has been driven by our success in Counter-Strike, but not exclusively by that. For years, we have also had strong initiatives there, including the relationship we developed around League of Legends with RNG, which was somewhat of a sister team for us, as well as our strong performance against them at the 2018 Worlds. We have maintained that relationship for years, including when we brought Bo (Zhou Yangbo) over to Europe in League of Legends. We were the first team to identify a top Chinese talent and bring him to Europe. All of that means that we have always had a very friendly and privileged relationship with the country.

Obviously, we want that relationship to continue. I know that VALORANT is a significant game there. It is one of the biggest drivers and channels for exposure. The day we qualified for Champions, we received roughly 80 to 90 messages just through the players’ accounts, asking about merchandise and activations. We can see how much enthusiasm there is for us among the Chinese audience, and we’re happy to go and visit them and return the support they have shown us.

We have quite a few activations planned on site, as well as several events and activities with them. We want to give back some of the love they have been sending our way for the past few years, together with the entire roster. I think it will feel a little bit like playing at home for us. It is a privilege to be able to consider this market and this country a friend of Vitality and a place where people support the Hive.

Neo: We have always been very ambitious, and we have always wanted to compete for roughly the top three across all the games in which we are involved. VALORANT is no exception. Even when we had somewhat more modest rosters, we still managed to reach Champions before we entered this somewhat overused Super Team narrative.

We have a fairly substantial legacy in the game. We have been there since the VRL days, with a great deal of success on the local scene, and then, I would say, we have consistently had very interesting runs over the years. We are attached to the game. We have had that FPS DNA since those days. But today, we want VALORANT to reach a dimension somewhat comparable to Counter-Strike, even though, once again, as I mentioned, the game’s constant updates and patches can make it somewhat unpredictable.

We want to keep investing in it with a little more stability because I think a roster change as significant as the one we made between 2025 and 2026 was unusual, and it was our way of starting a new cycle. We are happy with the roster, we are happy with the cycle we are in, and we know very well that next year we will be capable of competing at the top of the standings once again and becoming a contender for the Champions title. The objective is for the team to return to the top of the pyramid and be capable of winning world championships, or at the very least to be part of the conversation when it comes to potential world champions. And I think VALORANT is one of the few games in which Vitality is capable of doing that. That is why we want to look ahead and continue investing in this ecosystem.

Neo: I think we need to move in that direction. I think he has had a very encouraging rookie year, both statistically and in terms of leadership. He still has a great deal to show. On many occasions, he has been held back somewhat by his own circumstances, whether because of pressure or because he was operating in a new environment. I think his second year will benefit him greatly. He genuinely has the potential to become one of the best, if not the best, player in his position for years to come.

We want to continue nurturing this truly atypical talent, who still has an enormous amount of room for growth. He reads the game well, he has a remarkable ability and natural ease when it comes to anticipating and understanding how plays will unfold. Players like that are rare. When you have one, you need to know how to retain them and surround them with the right pieces, even though players with that kind of talent tend to have high expectations and strong personalities. They are not necessarily easy players to manage, but that is the nature of every great player in the making. I believe that is what awaits him, at least. I am a strong believer that he will have a very successful and very long career and that he will win a major title.

Neo: We need to be careful because, indeed, I think we will always need an amateur and semi-professional circuit to nurture talent and teach players the right habits. I also think that, for the ecosystem as a whole, not everyone can be Vitality or any large organization that aspires to compete for titles or participate in all the biggest franchise leagues. So we always need to leave a door open for new enthusiasts and for people who also want to learn.

Personally, I regret seeing the model come to an end. Now, from our own perspective, our relationship with the academy system is both true and false, in a sense. We were somewhat disruptive in the way we approached signing and then loaning players. We did that with VALORANT initially and with Sayonara. I think we introduced something of a new model and a small revolution at the time when it happened. Beyond that, we have always positioned ourselves as strong partners of the amateur and semi-professional scene, and of Riot more generally.

When we took over DVM, it was also to help the league, Webedia, and Riot during a difficult situation and to play our part in supporting that ecosystem. So we will always be willing to participate and to help Riot and its ecosystem support the Tier 2 and Tier 3 scenes. I think that is far too important to let disappear. Now, we’ll see how things evolve. I think the ecosystem will naturally adapt, and there will inevitably be room for other circuits, smaller tournaments, and so on. But in any case, as a partner, we will remain supportive and will help, as we have done over the years, particularly with everything that happened around DVM.

Neo: We have always been strong supporters of the development of the women’s and inclusive scene. That is something we did for a long time with League of Legends. I mean, I believe we are the oldest organization alongside SK to have remained involved in the game. This year, that investment is finally paying off because we are almost the most dominant team in women’s League of Legends, following our victory at the Equal Esports Cup, where we have finally achieved success after years of building, developing projects, and investing in the scene.

So we have always had that desire. And we have never hidden it. If we enter this new partnership phase next year, Vitality will be in Game Changers. It is something we are actively working on and something we have been looking at for years. We have had quite a few opportunities, but each time, for one reason or another, the circumstances were not quite right. What is certain is that if we are among the selected partner teams next year, Team Vitality would look to enter Game Changers, with the possibility of having a team that can play a meaningful role in the circuit.

Neo: I think that perception is mostly external, in the sense that the success and aura surrounding Vitality’s Counter-Strike team today are so extraordinary that they can overshadow a large part of our other lineups. I mean, we have won 16 major tournaments in the space of two and a half years, and these weren’t minor tournaments. It is an anomaly on an esports scale, and it shows just how exceptional these players are. So I think anyone would be in their shadow.

T1 could ultimately say the same thing: despite winning the Masters Bangkok, not everyone talks about anything other than League of Legends. That is simply what happens when you have a team that is that dominant. Our approach is a little different. Today, we believe VALORANT reaches another audience, one that is also much more global. We see that through the interest we receive in China, and even in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, which is currently one of Vitality’s key markets. In France, obviously, there is a great deal of competition, but we are still a major local seller.

So no, today we see genuine potential. Our objective is for VALORANT to become the counterpart to CS. Obviously, that takes years, but CS also took years. It took almost six years before we had a team capable of winning a Major. So we are reaching a similar level of belief and maturity with VALORANT. We believe we are not far from finally putting ourselves at the forefront of the scene.

And the day we are at the forefront with a title that truly matters, like a Masters or a Champions, Vitality will be capable of carrying that momentum, embracing everything that comes with it, and making sure that we are seen not simply as a Counter-Strike organization, but as an organization that has achieved success across FPS titles in general.

And I think VALORANT has that potential for us because, on the contrary, there is virtually no overlap between the two audiences. There are a lot of opportunities for crossover and a great deal of potential for us. That is why I think we are an exciting team and an exciting project for Riot.”