Skyesports announces cancellation of Skyesports Masters 2025

Days after officially revealing that they will be hosting an international Counter-Strike LAN in India in November 2025, Skyesports have announced that they have officially cancelled another international LAN they were supposed to host, the Skyesports Masters 2025.

Skyesports have stated that they have taken the call to cancel not only Skyesports Masters 2025 but also their planned Tier-1 Counter-Strike events in 2026 as a result of shifting focus to 'Tier-2 and the grassroots ecosystem.' The tournament organiser says that they aim to create more accessible opportunities for upcoming teams and wants to establish a more sustainable pathway to the Tier 1 ecosystem.

Skyesports will round out 2025 with one final LAN event, which will be the Chennai Esports Global Championship (CEGC) CS2 event, scheduled to take place in November 2025 and is open to teams from India, Southeast Asia and Europe. The $50,000 tournament is a Tier-2 ranked event and will have open qualifiers for the three mentioned regions before the top 2 teams from each region head to the Playoffs, which will be the LAN in Chennai.

After hosting the Skyesports Championship in 2024 which saw the likes of The MongolZ, 3DMAX, Aurora and Eternal Fire come to India to take part in the LAN event in Mumbai, Skyesports has not hosted any international LANs since then. In January 2025, HLTV released a report which stated that Skyesports was one of the tournament organisers, who were cautioned by Valve to stick to the 'Tournament Operating Requirements'. Skyesports had already cancelled the Skyesports Souvenir 2025 after revealing that they couldn't get a rescheduling and wildcard invite exceptions from Valve. The Skyesports Masters 2024, was an online tournament, held last year in April with the event moving from LAN to online at the 11th hour due to logistical issues faced by Skyesports.

The tournament organiser though, has hosted two domestic events, the Skyesports Pro League 2025, which was an online event and the Skyesports Souvenir National Championship 2025, which was a LAN event held in Bengaluru.

Earlier in March 2025, in an exclusive interview with Dust2 India, Skyesports founder and CEO, Shiva Nandy had revealed that they had 'big plans' for Skyesports Masters 2025. The Skyesports Masters 2025 was supposed to have their online closed qualifiers run between October 13 - 20 while the main event was set to be held with a Play-Ins consisting of two groups of four and Playoffs, that was supposed to be the top four teams battling it out for a $350k prize pool.