The annual race to sign up for the biggest open bracket in esports is reaching its final stretch. Evo has officially dropped its latest late-entrant registration leaderboard, and the standings provide a fascinating look at which communities are actually showing up to the venues and which ones are surviving on pure internet hype.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody who has touched a modern arcade stick, Street Fighter 6 is continuing its absolute reign at the top of the mountain. Capcom’s flagship title is comfortably occupying the number one slot, fresh off a massive historic run at Evo Japan where it set a literal Guinness World Record for the largest single-game fighting competition bracket.
The New Order
The real drama is brewing just beneath the crown. Tekken 8 is holding steady in second place, proving that its dedicated competitive scene remains incredibly resilient despite a rocky period of patch updates earlier this season.
The biggest surprise on the podium belongs to Riot Games. Their tag-team fighter 2XKO has officially locked down the number three spot on the leaderboard. I’m personally shocked, anyway. While some internet critics spent the spring claiming the game was losing its initial momentum, Riot deployed a brilliant piece of psychological warfare to boost their numbers: they promised a totally free, exclusive “Pool Party Senna” skin to anyone who physically registers and enters the bracket.
Fighting game players will look past a lot of frame data complaints if you promise them a shiny cosmetic, and the strategy has effectively catapulted the title straight into the upper echelon of the tournament.
The Artificial Climb
Further down the grid, Rivals of Aether 2 pulled off a shocking upset by leaping past community staples like Guilty Gear -Strive- to claim the fourth position. However, veteran scene analysts are advising fans to take that specific metric with a massive grain of salt.
The spike is largely driven by an aggressive registration campaign funded by Ludwig and Offbrand Games. While the raw numbers look incredible on a chart, history shows that massive, campaign-driven sign-ups usually result in astronomical DQ rates during the actual pool stages on Friday.
Unless those players actually book their flights to Vegas, Strive is still the organic heavyweight of the mid-tier.
The Battle for Sunday
The leaderboard gives us a clearer picture of what the final schedule will look like when the tournament takes over the main arena. With Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and 2XKO looking like absolute locks for the Sunday showcase, the remaining slots are a total battlefield. SNK’s Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves was sitting pretty in the top six until the sudden Rivals 2 wave knocked it down a peg.
Meanwhile, traditional titles like Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising are settling into their comfortable middle-ground roles. They aren’t pulling in the 10,000-player crowds of Capcom, but they possess a fiercely loyal player base that refuses to let their lobbies go quiet.
Riot’s free skin strategy successfully filled the pools, but those players actually have to show up to the tournament floor to collect. Get ready for a historic amount of first-round byes when brackets go live.
