Where are all the women? And the non-ALGS tourney scene

This is The Final Circle, a newsletter for competitive Apex

Scrim lobbies go unfilled, depriving teams of practice for the biggest tourney since the coronavirus pandemic began. One of the most popular streamers is thinking about quitting. Pros despair over the state of the game.

But as we roll up to the big Super Regional Playoffs on September 12th and 13th, I thought it would be nice to discuss some non-ALGS tournaments, and take a little time to see all the good happening right now in Apex, particularly on the pro-amateur level and internationally. While North America is pessimistic about the game right now, Japan is still going absolutely nuts for Apex, dominating the #apexlegends hashtag on Twitter and Instagram and enjoying a lively professional scene.

Japan loves Apex

RAGE ASIA 2020, a tournament that took place on August 30th, had a prize pool of one million yen (roughly $10,000). The South Korean team T1, made up of KaronPe, Parkha and Obly dominated, dropping an 18-kill win in the first game and picking up another win and a second-place finish in the five games of the tournament. It’s probably best enjoyed by Japanese speakers, but I immediately noticed the high quality of the broadcast, which took place in a studio, with glass partitions between commentators and camera tricks that made RAGE look and feel like a pre-pandemic tournament. ALGS broadcasters are still stuck at home, but it might not be long before workarounds like those in place at RAGE make it across the Pacific.

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Women in Apex and the pro-amateur tourney scene

As NRG’s Lulu, one of the top ten streamers in Apex, considers whether to quit the game, it’s worth highlighting the women in Apex and the amazing work they do.

The streamer Ninjayla, herself one of the most prominent women in Apex, was talking about these issues back in July. Since then, there’s been some progress on welcoming and developing female talent in Apex, but not nearly enough.

For example, those of us who watched the Preseason Invitational in Krakow last year were blown away by one of the best players in the tournament, the Russian player Esdesu on team 789, who placed 5th and netted $39,000.

After Krakow the roster was signed to Luminosity, where they quickly picked up a $10,000 GLL win, but Esdesu was dropped from the competitive roster this summer and has yet (to my knowledge at least) to get signed by a different team. It’s inexplicable that the pro scene would ignore one of its brightest female stars, but let’s hope this is only a temporary situation and that she’ll be competing for an org again soon. She still grinds the game and was the #229 Apex Predator when I checked her stream today, going hard in extremely sweaty lobbies.

Women in Apex are also shining on the pro-amateur level. HisandHersLive host an ongoing tournament series called the Juka Bowl in partnership with their org RCO, a format where each team is required to have at least one female on the roster. This field of this last Juka Bowl, the first I’d seen, had a fairly uneven skill level—some teams had two pros, others only had one—but it was some of the most entertaining competition I’ve seen in Apex, comparable to the Daltoosh Invitational for fun factor. The Canadian ALGS caster/ALGS fragger GuhRL played; so did Ninjayla, who’s also done ALGS casting work.

Rogue’s Dropped, CLG’s Madness, and the Argentinian player Evzy, signed to Millions Gaming, fragged out for the win, leaving the similarly overpowered second-place team —the content creator Clara, Nokokopuffs, and Complexity’s Reptar—in the dust, with the rest of the field lagging even further behind. Evzy was incredible, holding her own in kills and damage dealt on a team of top-tier maniacs; look out for Millions Gaming at the Super Regional Playoffs for the Americas, where they qualified to hopefully get a share of that $140,000 prize pool.

Some tournaments are going even further to promote women in Apex. On August 22nd, The Lady Legends, an all-female org, held a female-only kill race that brought out a ton of talented women. The Lady Legends partnered with the audio company DTS to offer a modest but hardly insulting cash prize as well as audio gear to the podium teams.

In the top three teams, I saw a ton of players who were new to me, mixed in with a couple of familiar names: Mulvana, in the third-place squad, was one of the notable players from the Netflix-Apex collaboration tourney, The Old Guard Invitational, a spectacle of product placement I wrote about last month. And reinality is the player better known as Wraithella. To put it mildly, she was the subject of some controversy a few months back when her identity was called into question and she was dropped from content creation at Rogue the same day she was signed. Whatever the details of the situation, she’s still shunned by the Apex community, and her status is emblematic of the toxicity and abuse heaped on women trying to make their mark on the scene.

We can do our part as fans to encourage women thriving at the professional level by supporting orgs like The Lady Legends and players like GuhRL, Ninjayla, and Esdesu, who’ve already achieved some level of prominence. We can also support women who might not have that kind of name recognition, the players who don’t yet have Twitch followings, the ones grinding in lobbies and enduring a lot of bullshit just for playing the game.

Apex earnings sorted by org and by player

Lastly, Liquipedia’s Kanochu crunched some really interesting numbers about earnings in pro Apex. 2019 and 2020 gave out roughly the same total prize money, around $1.5 million, for a total of $3.18 million awarded over the life of the game.

Surprising no one, TSM topped the org list; of the top five earners in Apex, three of them are on TSM and the other two, Dizzy and HusKers, have quit the game. Of the top ten earners, only half are still playing Apex.

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