Valve to Prohibit Franchise Leagues in Counter-Strike Starting 2025

Valve has published a post on the Counter-Strike blog announcing a change in its approach to the competitive scene, with the updated rules taking effect from 2025.

"We think that Counter-Strike should be an open sport. So we’re going to add new requirements to running large-scale competitive events. The finer details are still in progress, but here are the broad strokes:

• Tournament organizers will no longer have unique business relationships or other conflicts of interest with teams that participate in their events.
• Invitations to all tournaments will use our ranking system, or otherwise be determined by open qualifiers.
• Any compensation for participating teams—prize pool or otherwise—will be made public and will be driven by objective criteria that can be inspected by the community," reads the post.