Tyson ‘TenZ’ Ngo’s retirement sent shockwaves through the Valorant esports community as one of its brightest stars chose to hang up his mouse and keyboard. This retirement story is not unique to the former Sentinels player, and he has many blueprints to follow.
TenZ joined the lineage of esports pros closing the door on their competitive career to pursue content creation on September 14.
The Masters Reykjavík and Madrid winner said he was tired of the grind required to compete at the highest level and wanted to explore what he could do as a streamer and creator without the hassle of practice and tournament play.
TenZ also said he has always wanted to be a streamer and content creator, and that becoming an esports pro was a natural progression from broadcast games.
TenZ has two international trophies to his name.
“I think professional play kind of just came at me because I grinded the game so much. I put so much effort in and I was able to get good enough to be called a professional-level talent,” he said in his retirement announcement.
His reasoning is not much different from Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek, who retired from Counter-Strike in 2018 to focus on streaming.
“There isn’t a rule book for how to become a professional video game player. You don’t grow up planning for it, or even knowing it’s an option… And then you wake up, one day, and you’re trying to figure out how to write a retirement statement,” shroud said in his announcement post.
TenZ also retired at the same age of 23.
However, TenZ’s retirement is a more high-profile move compared to players who have made the transition before him.
TenZ is different from shroud and his contemporaries in key ways
Unlike shroud, Tarik ‘tarik’ Celik, or Félix ‘xQc’ Lengyel, TenZ was the face of his esport. He was the first professional Valorant player, making the jump while on C9’s CS:GO bench, and he won the first major international Valorant event in 2021.
The Canadian was always swarmed with requests to swap jerseys and play with other pros at events, and many current top players say TenZ is their idol, the reason they started their professional journey.
Other retired esports pros that are now the face of streaming like shroud and xQc all had massive followings before throwing in the towel on competitive gaming, that’s how they were able to make the jump into content creation.
But they weren’t the face of the game.
None of his contemporaries can match up in terms of the impact that their career, let alone retirement, will leave on Valorant or esports.
However, TenZ still owes his transition to the many who set the blueprint before him and their journey’s post-esports can also inform how the next step in his career will unfold.
TenZ’s post-esports blueprint
The closest comparison to TenZ is shroud, as the two Canadians garnered a massive following with Cloud9, and retired at the same age for largely the same reasons.
Post-retirement, and arguably during his final months as a pro, shroud played mostly games not called Counter-Strike. Like many other streamers, he hopped to the most popular titles of the month but kept to his roots by sometimes prioritizing FPS games.
TenZ has said he is mostly sticking to Valorant for his streams, but don’t be surprised if he switches to Deadlock or other popular titles for a time instead.
Sentinels Twittershroud has a history as one of the sharpest aimers with a mouse in-hand.
A return to esports is also not out of the question, and TenZ has expressed a willingness to suit back up if needed for Sentinels. Retired pros with big followings have returned to competitive gaming for short stints in the past.
The most recent example is shroud, who stepped in as essentially an emergency sub to bring some hype back for the Sentinels brand after a disastrous 2022 season. Another example is the Delta Fox Challengers team which consisted solely of retired League of Legends pros with big followings on Twitch.
However, expansion outside the game they went pro in has been the priority for many former esports players, and TenZ shouldn’t be that different. He can try to be one of the faces of a new title, much like what tarik has done with Valorant, or expand into different areas of content like IRL streaming.
Unlike tarik and shroud, however, TenZ seems excited to get out in the world and try different avenues of content. While both tarik and shroud seem content to sit at home and grind games to their massive audiences, TenZ said in his retirement video that he wants to travel and attend events he couldn’t make time for as a pro.
This puts him more in the realm of xQc, who has massively outgrown his Overwatch roots.
The blueprint for a select few former pros seems to be to outgrow the esport you came from. Whether TenZ can or will do that remains to be seen. Either way, it’d be no surprise if he was set for life off the back of his legendary Valorant career, and he’ll be sorely missed in the pro scene.
As for the Valorant pro scene, though? TenZ is leaving a huge void for the region as a player everyone looked up to. While this is a little scary for the future of the esport in some ways, it also leaves plenty of room for a new prodigy to step in and make a name for themselves as the face of the esport.