Breaking: Valve cancel all MRQs, Majors to invite-only system

Valve have made a massive change to the Counter-Strike 2 esports landscape today, announcing that the upcoming StarLadder Budapest Major 2025 will invite all 32 teams exclusively from the Valve Regional Standings (VRS) while canceling all Major Regional Qualifier (MRQ) events.

What this means in practice is that teams ranked lower than the invite cutoff for the Budapest Major will have no chance of making their way into the second Major of 2025 as the invites for Stage One will be based on the final ranking update on October 8th.

Valve's comment to StarLadder about the change reads:

"One of the goals of the VRS is to standardize community events so that they can be integrated with the Majors. At this point we believe that a separate qualification process for the Major is both unnecessary and disruptive. Therefore, we’ve made the decision to cancel the Fall 2025 MRQs. Instead, the 32 teams participating in the Budapest Major will be invited directly from the VRS."

The implications for this are wide-reaching especially in smaller regions, like North America, where teams have less opportunities to claim VRS points via domestic competitions.

It is currently unknown if Valve intend on still using sub-regions as the basis for invites, with this potentially benefiting sub-regions that have more events, for example South America versus North America.