According to undisclosed sources of HLTV, CS2 Majors will be changed significantly from 2025. The RMRs, which are the qualifiers for these tournaments, will disappear, and their place will be taken by an invitation-based system.
Of course, this system will not be implemented purely preferentially. Teams will be invited based on their global rank, which in turn will follow Valve’s rules. On top of that, the number of participants is set to increase from 24 to 32. This way, we will no longer have Majors where lots of important teams are not present.
The truth is that fans care very little about the RMRs. What they want is to see their favorite players and teams clash against each other in the biggest CS2 tournaments of the year.
Some organizations, like Fnatic and G2 Esports, attract many viewers regardless of their current rosters. If they happen to perform poorly during the RMRs and miss the Major, that’s bad for everyone involved. And you can’t really say that they don’t deserve to be at the Major if they’re in the top 30 overall.
A New Format
With 32 teams in the race, organizers will need to come up with a new tournament format. What that format will be remains to be seen. But most likely, instead of two Swiss stages, there will be three.
An alternative would be to create four groups of eight teams and then have just one Swiss stage before the playoffs.
There are a few other options but it all depends on what the organizers want to achieve. Intuitively, a large number of matches would be desirable because they greatly increase the viewership numbers.
But this would also increase the duration of the Majors significantly. These tournaments are already quite long, lasting for two weeks.
