VALORANT is heading for sustainability with VCT 2025 changes
Published: Aug 23, 2024
After four years, the VALORANT Champions Tour has expanded and matured into a global series with huge international tournaments. With so many lessons learned, Riot Games has used community feedback to restructure the VALORANT Champions Tour 2025 – here’s a concise look at all the changes.
Valorant puts pros first in VCT 2025
Let’s start by discussing the most significant change for VALORANT betting as Riot Games is finally reworking the calendar. Especially with the birth of regional international leagues, professional players have complained about a season which is too short and jam-packed, causing burn-out and fatigue. Meanwhile, an overly long off-season adds to the inconsistency of the calendar.
Instead of taking place between February and August, the VALORANT Champions Tour 2025 spans from January to October, with off-season VALORANT tournaments filling in the gap:
Running with this theme of putting professional competitors first, format changes include adding more teams for regional Playoff tournaments, improving the seeding system for VALORANT Champions and including more teams in the leagues (1 more Ascension team each).
Lining up new content and seeking new markets
The revamping of the VALORANT Champions Tour solves an underlying issue with the timing of content and competitive tournaments. For the past few years, updates to the title with new maps, new agents and balance changes have aligned irregularly with international tournaments.
Now, Riot Games plans on creating a “deeper integration between game and sport” to make the game more immersive both in terms of content and regarding the Esports Hub, Pick ‘Ems, Premier Mode and team skins.
Topping it all off, new locations have been revealed for the 2025 VALORANT Masters tournaments across the three major regions:
- Pacific – Bangkok, Thailand
- Americas – Toronto, Canada
- EMEA – Paris, France
While Paris hosts VALORANT Champions this season, China’s not being left out and has been marked as the host of the 2026 VALORANT Champions tournament.
Overall, all of these changes are positive and will benefit competitive VALORANT as one of the leading esports games. Check out the original press release here.
