The revised ALGS Championship has some pros fuming
This is The Final Circle, a newsletter about a global esport
A year after coronavirus cancelled the Arlington LAN, the pandemic has struck down what many hoped would be a triumphant return to the format: the ALGS Championship. Movie theaters, sports stadiums, and other fixtures of shared public life are gradually reopening. Esports like PUBG and Valorant have decided it is safe to proceed with limited in-person events as well. The nearly two-month-long $3.5 million prize pool PUBG Global Invitational ends tomorrow in Incheon, South Korea, where the 32 invited teams all underwent a two-week quarantine upon arrival and where the matches were played without any audience. A tournament on the Valorant Champion’s Tour was just held in Reykjavík, Iceland, where similar protocols were followed for the 10 competing teams. As far as I know, there have been no documented cases of coronavirus at either event.
But other developer-led esports ecosystems unveiled online-only schedules for the entirety of 2021, like Overwatch and Fortnite, or have recently postponed planned LAN events, like the Six Invitational, the top-tier event of Rainbow Six Siege, meant to take place in Paris. And as I discussed last week, recent layoffs at Activision Blizzard Esports showed that LAN, as it once was, is unlikely to return anytime soon.
The format of the ALGS Championship was finally unveiled yesterday, and among a bundle of other changes that have some pros grumbling, the big-ticket gripe is probably that it will be played online, giving absolutely no one an excuse to visit Japan. As my girlfriend pointed out, foreigners won’t even be allowed to attend the Tokyo Olympics this year unless they’re competing for a medal, so the idea of a massive LAN for Apex in Japan this year was always a bit dubious.
More concrete and legitimate complaints from pros and fans involved the corresponding change in formatting to the tournament. Instead of an elite competition where lobbies would’ve been stacked with the very best teams from around the world, the finalized format allows teams without top-tier records to easily qualify, either on ALGS points or their performance in just one tournament.
While 60 teams were initially teased in the preview format, 170 teams will now be competing in the championship. The massive increase in the amount of teams competing for the same prize money (in addition to splitting that $1 million across regions) has some elite players understandably upset.
Respawn/EA just hired another employee to serve as a liaison with the competitive community. Looks like they’ve got some work to do! Ultimately Apex lacks a player’s association or union, and other than collective action (like a strike, unlikely to happen) pros have zero recourse to dispute anything the ALGS does—beyond broadcasting their dissatisfaction on social media.
SCARZ and MCD
There might not be a LAN in Japan this year, but there’s plenty of Apex happening there regardless. When the talented orgless roster MCD announced they’d signed to a team, the communitity couldn’t help but speculate. Who had signed them? Luminosity, who dropped their Apex roster this month, was among the more popular guesses. Others wondered whether TSM was going to sign a second Apex squad, or if Made in Thailand was plotting a return to Apex by signing an EU roster.
Ultimately, it was the Japanese esports team SCARZ who’d picked up Mande, Taisheen and rpr. Fan clued into the APAC North scene probably knew SCARZ was looking for another squad, since they’ve had a chaotic few weeks of roster changes: in February, SCARZ dropped the entire SCARZ Black roster, while a member of SCARZ White, Firo, also recently left.
This is a bit of pattern for SCARZ, who feels no compunction about dropping teams that don’t perform well. They picked up a Korean roster last year only to disband it two months later, after they’d played poorly in precisely one tournament.
By signing MCD, they get a squad with a proven track record of success and a horde of ALGS points. Without having to go through the costly and uncertain process of talent development, grinding second-tier tournaments and all those unpleasantries, SCARZ has secured a guranteed spot in EU’s Winter Circuit Playoffs, thanks to MCD’s win in its first tourney. More importantly, they’re one of only a few teams in EU who have already qualified for that $1,000,000 prize pool much-awaited ALGS championship.
Japan is the second-largest market for Apex after the United States. Advertisements for Apex, most recently in anticipation of the game’s release for the Switch, have graced the famous Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo—it’s a poor comparison, but that’s a little like seeing a gigantic Octane on a Times Square billboard.
According to an official Twitter blog post from January, Japan is the country that tweets the most about gaming in the world, and the Apex scene there, in a word, is huge.
One of the weaknesses of The Final Circle, particularly in recent months, has been a lack of attention to the Apex being played across the Pacific. While most of that is probably due to the language barrier and time zones, I think, at least in part, that this myopia comes down to livestreaming preference—Twitch is simply not the default livestreaming platform in Japan, where it’s struggled to achieve the kind of cultural dominance and corresponding market share that it has in the United States.
A tale of two Hals
ShibuyaHAL, for example, a popular Japanese Apex player and sometime tournament organizer, has nearly half a million subscribers on YouTube, and does his streaming there, via a extremely cute anime avatar. While he simulcasts on Twitch at least some of the time, YouTube is his main audience, and it is simply massive. To give another sense of the gigantic audience for Apex in Japan, ShibuyaHAL also has 260,000 Twitter followers. That’s double the follower count of another lesser-known Hal in Apex: TSM’s ImperialHal.
It’s still really tough to keep an eye on global developments in an esport confined to regional match-ups, but as Apex looks to resume international play I fully intend to make a bit more of an effort to cover what’s happening outside my backyard.
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What to watch this week:
Winter Circuit Playoffs. There’s oodles of cash on the line, Respawn/EA is making a big advertising push, and orgs like SCARZ, Altiora, and Charlotte Phoenix are signing teams with lots of ALGS points.
Here’s the broadcast schedule, fresh from Discord: as usual I’ll be live-tweeting this when I can @UR_Scrubb.
Other assorted news:
GLL announced their Masters Spring event, flush with a $100,000 prize pool. But GLL still hasn’t paid Third Impact’s BallonG his prize money from last year’s Masters Summer :/. Monster Energy drink partnered with the ALGS. John Larson, who works on game balance, wants to know what you think about the Heat Shield. Ben Sledge over at The Loadout covered MCD’s move to SCARZ and spoke to rpr about it. TeQ made an convincing case for removing the Kraber from tournaments.
Have a great weekend and enjoy the Apex!
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