Valve decided that a random Wednesday would be a good day to drop an update. And not your typical game update – a Major format update.

In 2025, gone are the pesky RMR’s and gone are those couple of teams who can’t make the Major through them. I’m looking at you Astralis. As of the Austin Major in 2025, the tournament expands to 32 total teams, from the paltry 24 we had before.

Now, you may be asking, “Oh Mr. TL;DR, how will these teams qualify for this major without the Regional Major Ranking system?”

From everything we’ve heard, teams will be qualifying for the first of three Swiss stages, which we’ll just call the “Cheddar” stage, based on Valve’s Regional Standings. This sounds quite familiar.

For your viewing experience, we’ll now start the Major with:

The Cheddar stage (first Swiss stage)

The Challengers stage (second Swiss stage)

The Legends stage (third Swiss stage)

Finally, our normal bracket stage to find the Major champion.

Majors, now with 50% more cheese!

Here’s the problem: if you add more matches, there’s a possibility of adding more and more best of ones. And do we really think that more BO1s are the best way to run our prestige event?

With no RMRs, you don’t get teams like Into The Breach with their Paris run or AVANGAR in the finals at Starladder Berlin. And with no RMRs, teams like Astralis actually may qualify just on pure luck. Milage may vary on that statement.

Perhaps the only (hopefully) good news we’ll get from this is that 32 teams get stickers, and sticker money. It’s been shown time and time again that sticker money can be life changing for teams and players that are on the up-and-up.

Hopefully, moving to 32 teams means we get more of these Cinderella stories, and not teams that probably shouldn’t make the Major to begin with.