Esports World Cup 2025 announce CS2 event with $1.25m prizepool

Last week, the Esports World Cup announced their plans to host Counter-Strike 2 once again at the Saudi LAN event, seeing CS2 join a similar field of events that were featured at the inaugural $60M event series. For this edition of the CS2 tournament, EWC 2025 is set to set run from August 20th to August 24th, and will feature an increased $1.25m prizepool, a $250,000 increase from last year likely done to compete with S-tier tournament offerings from the likes of PGL and FISSURE.

Unlike last year, all invites to the Saudi-government supported event will be based on the Valve Ranking System (VRS), with the sixteen highest-ranked teams being offered spots based on the June 2025 rankings update.

EWC 2024 saw NAVI claim the first place prize of $400,000, while G2 in their first event with Mario "malbsMd" Samayoa finished in second place.

The prizepool distribution for EWC 2025 is as follows:

1st – $500,000
2nd – $230,000
3rd/4th – $100,000
5th/8th – $40,000
9th/16th – $20,000