It is once again that time of year, where you can vote for the winners of the 2025 Esports Awards. Our 10th annual award show is here and bigger than ever, ready to celebrate the best our industry has to offer. With the past 12 months featuring more memorable moments than ever before this year is set to have some of the closest run awards yet.
With 21 different categories, from the best players to supporting partners and on-air talent, there are a ton of finalists wanting your vote to increase their chance of walking away with an award. But you’ll need to be quick, as voting is only open until November 12th. You can vote once per day on our website.
Of course, it’s not just our awards that dominated the esports industry in October, we also saw multiple world champions crowned, legends retiring and major events confirmed for 2026. Everything you need to know can be found below.
Industry News
Caedrel Becomes A Three Time Finalist At The 2025 Esports Awards
After a year where he has been one of the most prolific content creators in esports it is no surprise that Caedrel has picked up multiple award nominations for the 2025 Esports Awards. You can vote for the former LoL pro to win the Esports Personality Of The Year, the Streamer Of The Year and the Esports Content Creator Of The Year awards right now, with three nominations leading the charge for the 2025 class of finalists.
A Stacked Group Of Finalists For Streamer Of The Year
Always one of the most hotly contested awards, the Streamer Of The Year category features the biggest names from the past 12 months of streaming. Caedrel, Ibai, Kai Cenat, IShowSpeed, AngryGinge, xQc, Jynzxi, Lacy, OhnePixel, ExtraEmily, Payal Gaming and Caseoh are all up for the award, with their communities already getting behind them and throwing votes their way.
Capcom Doubles Down On PPV Model
Capcom is running a pay per view model for the upcoming Capcom Cup Street Fighter tournament, with fans being required to pay in order to watch the live stream. This obviously caused backlash from fans, with esports traditionally being free to watch, but despite this Capcom has doubled down, releasing a statement claiming this is the best way to create a sustainable esports scene. How popular the PPV will be remains to be seen, but given the backlash you would expect viewing figures to be considerably down on previous years.
Valorant Opens Up Its Ecosystem For 2026
Riot Games has revealed the format for the 2026 Valorant season and while there are a number of improvements, one big change has seemingly boosted the tier two scene. For the first time since franchising, four teams from the Challengers level will qualify for the Champions tournament at the end of the year, giving those outside of the top level a chance to become world champions. Riot also announced Masters events in Santiago, Chile and London, England, while Champions will head to Shanghai, China.
Esports Legend Formal Retires
One of the greatest console FPS players of all time has announced his retirement, with Matthew “FormaL” Piper seemingly hanging up the controller after the 2025 Halo World Championship. FormaL is one of the few players in esports history to win world championships in multiple titles, being both a Call of Duty and Halo world champion. But, with the HCS being put on hold for the future FormaL revealed the recently completed World Championship would likely be his last pro event.
Falcons Sign Xiao Hai
Team Falcons has signed Zeng ‘Xiao Hai‘ Zhuojun, one of the best fighting game players of the past few years. Despite mostly being known as one of the best King of Fighters players ever, in recent years Xiao Hai has found significant success in Street Fighter, winning back to back Esports World Cup titles in Capcom’s fighter. Now the most successful fighting game player at EWC joins the most successful Club at EWC, which seems like a very obvious match for the two parties.
Evo France Returns in 2026
After a successful debut event, Evo is set to return to France in 2026. Announced shortly after the successful conclusion of the debut Evo France, which saw multiple big names take titles in a multitude of fighting games, the 2026 iteration of the event will return to Nice in October 2026. With Evo now seemingly having a foothold in Europe, the iconic fighting game series is one of the most global competitions in the scene, with events in Japan and the USA a staple of the FGC calendar at this point.
EWC Announces Initial Titles For 2026
The Esports World Cup has announced the initial tournaments for the 2026 competition, with many games from 2025 set to return as part of multi-year deals. 20 titles have been confirmed, all of which were at the 2025 event, including the likes of Valorant, Dota 2 and CS2, the latter of which is getting a prize pool bump to $2 million, making it one of the biggest events of the year. Four more titles are expected to be revealed in the coming months to complete the 2026 roster for EWC.
Competitive Results
Credit: Riot Games/Colin Young-Wolff
T1 Win Their Sixth World Championship
The South-Korean powerhouse T1 made history at the 2025 League of Legends World Championship 2025 by clinching its sixth world-title, and more significantly the very first three-peat in the tournament’s history, following their consecutive wins in 2023, 2024 and now 2025. In a dramatic Grand Final held on 9 November at the Dong’an Lake Sports Park in Chengdu, China, T1 edged out rival Korean team KT Rolster with a 3-2 scoreline, turning around a 1-2 deficit to take the trophy.
Shopify Rebellion Win Final Halo Infinite World Championship
With the Halo esports scene taking a vastly different look going forward, the final Halo Infinite World Championship was a celebration of the iconic series, with Shopify Rebellion coming out on top. They took down OpTic Gaming in the grand final 4-1, which secured legends of the game Bradley “Frosty” Bergstrom and Mathew “Royal2” Fiorante their fourth world championships.
NRG Wins Valorant Champions
Fresh off the back of winning the RLCS world championship last month, NRG has added another world championship to its trophy cabinet after winning Valorant Champions. The North American side took down Fnatic in an epic grand final that went all the way to a game five before a winner was crowned. The win sees Ethan “Ethan” Arnold become the first two time Valorant world champion having also won the tournament in 2023 as part of Evil Geniuses.
Team Vision Wins World Series Of Warzone
European squad Team Vision pulled off a somewhat surprise win in the World Series of Warzone tournament to become the first team outside of North America to claim the biggest prize in Warzone. The team, which features popular streamer Ethan ‘Fifakill‘ Pink, dominated the competition and took home the $300,000 first place prize. However, it seems that the roster has now gone its separate ways, and will not return for the 2026 season.
And Finally…
Credit: Counter-Strike 2 VALVE
Counter-Strike Skin Economy Loses Billions Overnight
October was a rough month for Counter-Strike skin collectors, with a small update to the game wiping out billions of dollars of value from the entire ecosystem. A new patch allowed CS players to upgrade five reasonably rare skins for knives and gloves, typically the rarest and highest value cosmetics in the game. This update increased the supply of these rare items, causing prices to crash in just a few hours. Shortly after the update, almost $2 billion had been wiped off the total market cap of CS skins, with some of the rarest items losing up to 70% of their value. The market has recovered slightly from the low, but is still well below what it was prior to the update.
