PGL have channeled their inner Daft Punk and are taking CS around the world. (Around the world)

With Valve’s new rules for TOs coming into effect in 2025, PGL seems to be trying to capitalise the hardest. They’ve announced a whole new circuit of events in cities around the world. Starting off in Argentina in February 2025. Hopefully there’s some good audio guys in South-America.

So far, the cities PGL has announced for 2025 and 2026 are Buenos Aires, Bucharest, Astana, and Belgrade. With one Perfect World collab in 2025 in China, and events in Barcelona and Sao Paulo and Barcelona only in 2026.

Each one of these events will have a prize pool of 1.25 million USD and will be included in Valve’s new ranked tournament ecosystem. That also means that all invites will be done through Valve Regional Standings, with no open qualifiers of any kind. That doesn’t need to be a bad thing, but it’s definitely a little odd at face value when these events are billed by PGL as “fostering a more vibrant and diverse competitive scene.”

Qualification aside, this has big implications for the scene. With these events, PGL is putting up more prize money than ESL over the year, and it’s packed the schedule. That means there’s an incentive to attend PGL events over ESL events, and teams will have to choose invites carefully. That just means we’ll see more teams competing all around, which is awesome.

It’s only taken a whole new game and some Valve intervention, but CS finally has some competition in the TO space.