Visa issues and time zones. Who cares! A Major is coming to NA. And to Texas no less.

Next summer, BLAST will host NA’s first Major since 2018. It takes place in the liberal Texas stronghold of Austin, where artists, tech bros, and barbecue pit bosses proudly wave their unofficial slogan of “keeping it weird”.

There’s probably been a reason for the big gap in Majors, given the visa issues we’ve seen at almost every NA event since… forever. Thankfully, IEM Dallas went pretty smoothly, which can only make one hopeful.

BLAST also announced that they’re changing their format for 2025.

Starting off with BLAST Bounty, a 32-man tournament with an interesting twist. Each team will have a bounty placed on their head based on their seeding, and if you beat someone you’ll win 50% of the bounty, while the rest goes onto your own. But they're using Valve rankings for invites, so something tells us seeding might be a bit dodgy.

Then there's BLAST Open, and BLAST Rivals.

These two events will be a bit like what you're used to. They're 16 and 8-team events respectively, aiming to get the best teams playing in arenas around the world.

This is all probably part of BLAST's plan to appease Valve. Will it work? More than likely. So long as their rankings are used, we’re sure they'll be happy.