The ALGS takes a summer vacation as smaller tournaments look to fill the gap
This is The Final Circle, a newsletter for the Apex community
Congrats to Kungarna and SCARZ for winning the NA and EMEA ALGS Championship respectively. Each team took home $265,000—the largest payday in Apex to date. While SCARZ enjoyed a confident win in EMEA, cruising to victory in Game 7 and finishing fifteen points ahead of Fire Beavers in 2nd place, the North American competition felt much closer. C9 and TSM each had golden opportunities to win the tournament and squandered them.
Kungarna’s Vein, Onmuu, and scuwry clutched up and deserve all their success, despite grousing from fans of the larger orgs. And while it may be cliché to call their win life-changing, in this case, it’s probably true. Just a few months ago, scuwry was in desperate circumstances, detailing his financial situation in a statement posted to Twitter and pleading for the community’s support:
As of yesterday I got news that we're gonna be losing our house and everything we have. I'm in a pretty rough situation and there's not many options. With covid, getting a job right now is about impossible with everyone losing theirs, even if I were to get a job I wouldn't be able to handle it well because of my weak back and feet. So I'm left with this option, streaming. If I can't make enough money off of streaming to keep our house, it's the end for me. There's nowhere for me to go in Canada and with covid I can't cross the border to live with my close friends, SO, my only option right now is to make money from streaming. I'm gonna be streaming every single day for as long as I can, trying to make something of this while keeping our house. I don't like being dramatic by saying "this is the end for me" but it really is the case. Anyone who comes into my streams and supports me is appreciated a crazy amount, even if it's just someone keeping my tab open. If you know me, you know I don't like asking for help financially but I really can't be stubborn right now.
If you can find the time to support my brother and I, it would go a long way.
Team Kungarna has been hitting the Apex scene hard, signing two competitive rosters and several high-profile Apex content creators like Babynikki and Zeroplus.
Kungarna owner Michael “The Fortnite Guy” Padilla, who used to go by the handle mykL back in his Overwatch days, made his name as a leaker and YouTuber. He had a mixed reputation as a journalist in the Overwatch community (to put it mildly) before leaving to make Fortnite drama videos, and in 2019 his Overwatch content was singled out for playing fast and loose with journalistic ethics. I’m genuinely glad to see Kungarna succeed in Apex, but there is reason to be cautious—the last time a smaller org in Apex signed so many players it was Sola Fide. I’m in favor of greater transparency (and regulation) for pro Apex salaries in general, and I’d love to get a look at a Kungarna contract. But in the meantime, I applaud the org’s undeniable success! Cheers to them and best of luck going forward.
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Viewership of competitive Apex soars during Championship finals
As I suspected they might, the NA Championship finals reached record numbers of viewers, both for the official ALGS broadcast and many of the players and commentators who streamed it. The official channel averaged 56,000 viewers over the course of NA finals, slightly edging out its earlier record reached during NA’s Winter Circuit Playoffs.
It was also a banner day for TSM’s ImperialHal, who notched his biggest stream to date. He also averaged around 56,000 viewers during the finals with a peak of 89,000 viewers, about 15,000 more than the official broadcast. Watch parties from NiceWigg and Daltoosh hit viewership records on their channels as well, showing solid growth for this one particular measure of interest in competitive Apex.
Summer vacation for the ALGS
The ALGS is taking the summer off. It will be back in September, but in the meantime, a series of third-party tournaments are looking to fill the gap. Newcomer BLAST, Esports Arena, Nerd Street Gamers, and BoomTV are among the heavy hitters. The pro-amateur circuit is also heating up, including a female-only scrim and tournament league hopefully starting later this summer:
Here’s a copy of the third-party tournament schedule from the ALGS email list.
Everything else on the scene
Zachmazer and the suddenly ubiquitous CEO-owner of Team Kungarna, The Fortnite Guy, have started a weekly podcast called Apex Uncut. The first episode debuted on Sunday and features the caster and esports veteran Falloutt.
The TSM instagram account mentioned a return to LAN for the next season of the ALGS. Credit to Redditor xShibes for the spot. Not yet confirmed by any official sources!
Ben Sledge, who’s done great work interviewing pro Apex players at the Loadout, is leaving the site. Check out this Twitter thread of some of his favorite stories.
NRG is back on top of the NA scene with a win in last week’s $10,000 Esports Arena tournament.
G2, who picked up Aim Assist before the Championship, signed a deal with the fashion brand Ralph Lauren.
A tweet from the @PlayApex account this week implied that Scull Town from King’s Canyon is coming back to the game—my guess would be as an Arenas map. Another tweet today seemed to confirm it:
Speaking of tweets, Apex is the second-most tweeted game of 2021, behind only Genshin Impact.
Claraphi, who was playing with Spacestation Gaming, left the team. According to Claraphi, his decision to leave came after the other members of the squad wanted to hold tryouts to replace him. Awkward considering that Spacestation just placed 5th overall in the ALGS Championship, splitting a hefty $35,000.
In related news, Claraphi was apparently banned from competing in Esports Arena events for his tweet replying to a picture of a Razer gaming chair (a gift from Razer to one of its sponsored players) pointing out that the players sponsored by Intel got the significantly less exciting gift of towels.
Hoping they were really high-quality towels at least?
I’ll be back with a big celebratory post tomorrow for the 1-year anniversary of The Final Circle. It’ll be a thorough debrief on the history of competitive Apex, take a look at some of the game’s biggest moments to date, and consider where Apex (and this newsletter) is going.
My publishing schedule will probably be far more sporadic this summer. I’m going to spend some time on topics that are less news-driven and more deep dives, which should be fun and a bit of a change from weekly news content. Regular posts will resume in September with the return of the ALGS.