ALGS Championship heads to Japan in 2025, new BLGS events unveiled for 2024

It's actually happening, the Year 4 ALGS Championships is heading to Japan. The event will take place in Q1 of 2025, with a new series of events unveiled called the BLGS for the remainder of 2024.

The Year 4 ALGS Championship will be taking place in Sapporo, Japan, located on the Japanese island of Hokkaido from January 29 to February 2, 2025. This news is likely to be extremely popular with the Apex community at large, with many asking for a Japanese ALGS event given the passionate fanbase in the country.

Although this will be the first time the ALGS has ever held an event in Asia or Japan, it is not the first international Apex event in Japan. Earlier this year, Apex Legends appeared at the Apex Legends Asia Festival in Tokyo.

EA and Respawn shared details of the Year 4 Championship location and dates during the closing ceremony of their ALGS Split 2 LAN in Mannheim, Germany. The ALGS Championships were expected to take place in Q4 of 2024, and this will be the first time the event is not held the same year as the two Split Playoffs.

"It made the most sense for us to push the Championship to this January time frame," said Jasmine Chiang, Senior Brand Marketing Lead for Apex Legends to esports.gg. "It aligns with so many big moments for the brand, including Season 24, and it aligns with the six-year anniversary of Apex Legends."

The ALGS Championship for Year 4 will take place in the Daiwa House Premist Dome in Sapporo, an immense stadium which at full capacity can seat over 42,000 people. For context, the Daiwa House Premist Dome is almost three times as large as Resorts World Arena in Birmingham (15,000 seats), which hosted the ALGS Champs in Year 3.

The Daiwa House Premist Dome is predominately used as the home ground of the Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo football team and the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters baseball team.

"There's just something about that Sapporo arena. When we walked in, it was a collective, immediate like 'Oh my God, this is it'," said Jasmine Chiang of EA. "It was an empty venue but you could picture the stage and hear the fans already. The front of house space available to activate it, plus just how excited the city of Sapporo was for this event, meant we knew we would have an awesome partner in them. Everything align and we knew this was the best venue for the ALGS Champs."

Sapporo is the capital of the mountainous northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is the largest city north of Tokyo with a population of approximately 1.9 million people. It's claim to fame is the Snow Festival, which will take place shortly after ALGS Championships. The festival lasts seven days and attracts over 2 million people.

EA and Respawn also unveiled they will be introducing a new tournament series, BLGS Open Tournament, to fill the five month gap between the end of Split 2 and the ALGS Championships. The BLGS - as the name hints at - will focus around the two now larger than life characters who are the faces of the ALGS B-Stream, NiceWigg and Greek.

"We've wanted to center a competitive series around NiceWigg and Greek for the longest time. Their brand is becoming synonymous with our brand, and they're such an integral part to the ALGS," said Jasmine Chiang of EA. "We're really excited to create this open series hosted by them, and we're going to have a little bit of fun with it too."

"This event is fully online and it's more of an open format tournament. It is not directly tied to the ALGS but it's a form of continued and sustained engagement during that time period from now until the ALGS Championships."

The BLGS will be what EA are calling an "open-format competition series". It will include a total of five separate weekends of competition starting in October, with a total prize pool of $400,000.

The BLGS will host events across four regions:

Each of the four regions will have $100,000 in total prize money awarded across the events. EA did not share any further information, but plan to do so in the coming weeks.

Much like VALORANT, Apex Legends' release coincided with a surge of interest in FPS titles in Japan. It began with Player Unknown's Battlegrounds and then spread to VALORANT and Apex Legends. Counter-Strike's history was extensive, and hopping on the CS train was far less appealing to players from Japan than being part of brand new games and communities. Apex Legends merch is also quite common in Japan, with some exclusive to the region.