In an awesome video posted on YouTube channel TheRankings, we can now travel through the years and see who ranked among the world’s top 15 Esports players by prize money earned.
Going all the way back to a benchmark of professional gaming, the general public’s most difficult to comprehend aspect of the industry has been financial earnings. Even in the most recent Simpsons episode that tackled the subject of Esports, the largest joke was Bart getting paid to play games.
There are a lot of very interesting things about this look at the last 18 years worth of Esports earnings.
Quake Once Ruled
Going as far back as the middle of 2000, Quake was a serious part of the top 15 rankings. Sure, the world of Esports at large knew that those tournaments were the only real place to get top-tier FPS action, but it’s surprising to see it rival StarCraft so much in those years. Today, the franchise is still very much alive in Quake Champions.
Alongside SoSo’s and Grrrr’s StarCraft earnings, the June 2000 chart has nine out of fifteen players in Quake leagues. After taking over the top spot in the fall of 2000, Quake pro Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel was the highest paid Esports athlete on earth for years to come.
His reign would end in late 2011, when World of Warcraft’s Jang “Moon” Jae-ho would claim the top spot. Fatal1ty would cap out around the $450,000 USD total in prize money earned.
The Dota 2 Takeover
Before the year 2012, the Esports earnings charts were ruled by StarCraft players, World of Warcraft players, and even the odd Halo pro-league star, but everything would change when a Warcraft mod would reinvent competitive gaming forever.
Defense of the Ancients (or Dota as it’s known) burst onto the scene when players like Danil “Dendi” Ishutin and Clement “Puppey” Ivanov started climbing the charts with those early Dota tournaments. Valve, the creators of Dota 2, have always put up huge numbers in terms of prize pools. It would take a while (another two years) before Dota 2 players topped the charts.
In 2014, The International by Valve would be the single largest prize pool in Esports history. The five members of the winning team Newbee (which including Mu, Banana, and Hao) all took home more than $1 million in prize money. Since the rise of Dota 2, It has ruled the top 15 ranks for Esports Earnings. The current highest paid Esports athlete ever is Dota 2’s Kuro "KuroKy" Takhasomi of Germany, with a staggering $4.1 million in earnings.
Without Internationals
At the end of the video, TheRankings show us what things would look like in the top 15 for Esports earnings with just the simple removal of the Valve Dota International Events.
Even in a world where the historically deep-pooled International tournament is non-existent, nine out of the top fifteen players on the lifetime earnings chart are Dota 2 players. According to EsportsEarnings.com, only four players in the top 50 ranked Esports players in history by earnings are non-Dota players, and those four are all CS:GO pros.
Andreas “Xyp9x” Hojsleth and his Astralis team members Dupreeh, dev1ce, and gla1ve make up those four standouts in the rankings. Coming in at number six on the list is League of Legends’ Faker, who has amassed over $1.1 million in earnings over the course of his five-year-long professional career.
It’s pretty crazy to look at the large scale of some of these lucrative and determined careers. Skills and trainer mixing with opportunity have afforded some of the best gamers on the planet to make very good money over the course of the last two decades.
With Esports continuously growing, and audiences getting larger, where do you think Esports will be in another ten years?
