What exactly is a "major"?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
1

My understanding is that the term traditionally refers to 4 tourneys: NEC, Final Round, EVO and Season’s Beatings. One for each season. Then you use the term “regionals” to refer to tourneys that are bigger than your locals but not on the scale of a “major”. Nowadays you have tourneys like CEO, SCR, NCR, Revelations, ECT, Winter Brawl etc that are big enough to be comparable to your NEC and Season’s Beatings (but not EVO and FR), but people are now refering to tourneys that are obviously not on the same scale as majors. What exactly makes a tourney a “major”, does just having a couple of big name present means it’s a major? Does the Road to Evo tag turn it into a major (which means those without a Road to Evo tag can’t be considered a major)? Because my feeling is that people have been abusing that term so much that it’s losing its meaning.

2

Regional = some people

Major = Shit load of People.

3

There is no clear cut definition. I’ve never heard of NEC/FR/Evo/SB being the traditional majors, and I don’t think there’s anything really lost by considering more tournaments majors since way more tournaments have grown up to and past the size people typically associate with being a major tournament.

4
  • The only people who have actual regionals were Namco and for a while Capcom and EVO
  • Major aren’t done by season, they’re done whenever they are done.
  • There is no “major commission” that dubs tournaments majors or no limit to how many or when they are as long as you can get the turnout. For most of the years since 2001 Philly has had 3 majors a year.
  • Its really just a matter of prep time, getting the word out and getting the numbers. If you wanted to throw a major in 6 months you could, provided you were okay with putting in a shit ton of work.
5

If the FGC is really gonna go the way of WWE, we should have 4 designated “Big Events” throughout the year.

For example, the WWE has the Royal Rumble, Summer Slam, Survivor Series, and the wrestling season ‘ends’ with Wrestlemania, much like the fighting game year ‘ends’ with Evo.