Update: RMR tournaments could be gone in 2025, Richard Lewis hints
Renowned esports journalist and PGL Major Copenhagen 2024 host Richard Lewis claimed yesterday on stream that Valve may discontinue their Regional Major Ranking (RMR) tournaments, which serve as the qualifiers for the Majors, in 2025.
The claimed change comes as the Counter-Strike 2 circuit is set to undergo a major overhaul in 2025, with PGL and StarLadder announcing a plethora of tournaments while ESL and BLAST's partnered leagues are set to come an end under Valve's new rules for Counter-Strike esports.
"Partner leagues are dead in 2025 and suddenly we have a major esports tournament every week. StarLadder are back, PGL are back, BLAST, ESL, all the partner leagues are dead. From what I'm hearing, RMRs might be gone."
While Lewis' clip was light on details on how the Major qualifiers may work in future, his mention of "ranking points" is an interesting hint about how teams may qualify for Majors in future. For those with good memories, when Valve first introduced RMR tournaments in 2020, it was originally a series of tournaments that awarded points to qualify teams to the Major.
Valve abandoned this idea after the PGL Major Stockholm 2021 and essentially returned to running Minors in all but name for following Majors, however a return to an open circuit may be the impetus for bringing the concept back to CS.
With 23 S-tier tournaments set to be run in 2025 from a variety of tournament organizers along with dozens of smaller tournaments, the circuit could potentially serve as the pathway directly into the Majors moving forward.
Lewis plans on providing more details in future, and with his exemplary track record, there's good reason to suspect that the future of CS2 esports could be quite exciting.
Update: In a later section of the stream Richard Lewis offered further context that the first Major of 2025 may still feature RMR events due to Valve still working on their ranking system. With this, Lewis expects that Valve's new system will be implemented in 2026 at the latest. We apologize for the inadvertent omission.
