Is there life other than Dota?
Over the past decades, thousands of games have been released around the world. Some of them were originally created with esports in mind, some completely ignored it, and in some initially casual video games, the community suffered the esports scene without the support of a publisher (hello, Team Fortress 2).
But which esports discipline is the best? The question is complicated — someone needs only eSports shooters, someone does not consider the conditional Fortnite eSports in principle, and oldies spit on everything except StarCraft.
In this top 10 esports games, we will take the simplest metric — the prize pools played in all tournaments in the game. But even such a simple method has drawbacks: the method does not take into account the level of salaries, sales of sponsored items of clubs and players in games, advertising contracts and many other details. However, it’s better than nothing.
Top 10 esports games
- Dota 2. The undisputed leader of the list. According to Esportsearnings, 1,500 tournaments were held in Dota (the calendar of current Dota 2 tournaments is here), and the total prize money amounted to almost $232 million. It’s all about the huge prize money at The International series of tournaments. Recently, the developers announced that TI10 will be held from August 5 to 15 in Sweden, and its prize pool will be $40 million. When the tournament ends, Dota 2 will break away from its pursuers in the top even more.
- CS:GO. Another game from Valve, but which develops along a completely different path. Majors here do not give players the opportunity to earn $ 20 million at a time. Instead, the game hosts many leagues and tournaments from third-party organizers, and the prize pools for them are serious, but not crazy. Over 5600 tournaments were played $113.5 million.
- Fortnite. If you haven’t been following Fortnite news, then the third place of the game may come as a surprise to you. Less than 700 tournaments were held on the game, but Epic Games managed to play impressive $102 million. Fortnite saw a particularly strong focus on esports in the 2019 season, when $30 million was raffled off at the Fortnite World Cup 2019. But after that, Epic’s interest in esports Fortnite cooled off.
- League of Legends. Dota’s main rival in the esports MOBA genre. At tournaments from Riot Games, three times less prize money was played — $83.6 million, but the tournaments themselves were held for a whole thousand more. And in general, LoL is developing in a different way: the publisher invests not so much in prize money, but in supporting the scene through the salaries of players, including at a lower level. Whereas Dota has only recently added a DPC system that should make life for tier 2 and tier 3 teams a little easier.
- Starcraft 2. An esports classic that still lives on. Since this is a solo discipline, the prize money in tournaments is many times less, but the game compensates for this with the number of tournaments and a long lifetime. Total played in SC2 $34.7 million, and the largest prize fund of one tournament was 700 thousand dollars, which was played at the WCS in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The Finnish player Serral earned the most prize money in his career — 912 thousand dollars.
- PUBG. The fate of esports in the royal battle was not easy, but the developers continue to develop it. At the recent PUBG Global Invitational, $7 million was raffled off, but the tournament didn’t really go well for clubs from the CIS: Virtus.pro took tenth place, NAVI — seventeenth. Seventh place in the top PUBG players is occupied by the Russian ubah, who won $390,000 in his career. In total, the developers played almost $33 million.
- Overwatch. Blizzard’s entry into the esports shooter scene and the creation of an esports scene that looks like a serious sport with the sale of slots in the Overwatch League, where $3 million is up for grabs per season. In total, in 5 years since the release of Overwatch, $26.7 million.
- Hearthstone. Another game from Blizzard. Despite the fact that the game was released two years earlier than Overwatch, there were fewer prizes played here — $25 million. This is due to the fact that this is a solo game. Thijs earned the most prize money (half a million dollars), and in third place was Russian Pavel with $300,000, who won Blizzcon in 2016.
- Arena of Valor. The first representative of mobile eSports in this top of the best games. “Arena”, to put it mildly, is not very popular in the CIS: in the top 25 players in terms of the number of prize money, only representatives of China, but the game is also played in other Asian countries: Thailand, Vietnam and Korea. For 62 tournaments on the game were played $24.09 million.
- Heroes of the Storm. Esports in Hots has been officially dead since 2018, but the reminder of the old days lives on. During the esports life of Hots, $18 millionand the top is dominated by players from South Korea, China is in second place, and the United States is third.
Avatars for CS:GO: funny, anime and under the bot
Esports games that haven’t made the top 10 (yet?)
- Rainbow Six Siege — $13.7 million
- Counter-Strike 1.6 — $13.5 million
- PUBG Mobile — $13.1 million
- Rocket League — $13.1 million
- SMITE — $9.2 million
- StarCraft: Brood War — $8.4 million
- Halo 5: Guardians — $7.0 million
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 — $6.7 million
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare — $6.6 million
- Crossfire — $6.6 million
What is the best esports game for you? Write in the comments!
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