Riot Games has announced details about the upcoming VALORANT Champions Tour (VCT) 2025 season, which is to start between January 11th-18 across all regions.
The upcoming season of the VCT will undergo several notable changes in its format, including more matches and a larger number of teams for each of the four regions. The VCT Champions event will also be moved to September and October.
The VCT is the highest-level competition in VALORANT. The game’s developer Riot Games often polishes and improves ecosystem’s structure each season, and 2025 is no different.
The most notable change for 2025 is a tweaked Championship Point System which allows for teams to qualify for VALORANT Champions, and the fact that the competitions will last through October.
The 2025 VCT season will start with a series of Kickoff events, which proved to be popular with fans this year. The first kickoff event planned is VCT China’s on January 11, followed by EMEA’s on January 15, Americas’ on January 16 and Pacific’s on January 18. The top two teams from each region will qualify for the first Masters event of the year, the Masters Bangkok in late February.
Riot also announced that the points system will be revamped to include ‘deeper points distribution at Masters and Payoffs’, and making stages ‘self-contained’, meaning that all teams will start the second half of the season with the same amount of points.
The qualification for Champions will also be changed, with two teams from each region qualifying through the Stage 2 playoffs, and two through Championship Points. Stage 1 and 2 will also be changed, with two groups of six teams competing in a round-robin format within the group and the top four teams from each group advancing to playoffs, which will be expanded to include eight teams.
With all of the VCT Ascension tournaments finished, we also know which new teams will enter the VCT in 2025. 2GAME Esports joins the Americas league, Apeks will be the new team in the EMEA league, XLG Esports won the Ascension China tournament and Sin Prisa Gaming advanced in the Pacific region. In addition, BLEED Esports has been stripped of its VCT status in the Pacific and will be replaced by BOOM Esports.
