Top 10 richest Esports players
From being a mainstream media laughing stock to having prize pools of multi-million dollars, Esports have come a long way. But such huge prize pools were not always there. Earlier Esports tournaments barely had any prize pool and during the late 2000s prize pools peaked at a few hundred thousand dollars at best.
But everything changed once the 2010s rolled around. With the advent of popular MOBA DotA, Valve and Riot Gaming became enrolled in a lawsuit as both wanted to develop a sequel game based on DotA. The lawsuit was settled soon enough and both companies developed their own versions of the game. Riot made League of Legends and Valve made DotA 2. These two games would change the esports landscape forever.
Valve kicked off DotA 2 with a 1 Million Dollar tournament in Gamescom 2011, Cologne. While Riot didn't have such a huge start they eventually hit the 2 Million mark with their second World Championship in 2012.
As it happens with such huge prize pools, some of the best players in the world won fortunes playing the game they loved. Winning the premier tournaments have now become lifechanging with Fortnite and DotA 2 having massive prize pools of over 25 million dollars USD. Here, I will take a look at the 10 Richest Players in esports history.
But before we start, there is something that we need to get out of the way. Owing to Valve's crowd-funding of DotA 2's The International and the huge player-base DotA has all over the world, the entire top 10 is just DotA 2 players with the first non-DotA player coming in at 13th. So, let's start the list with some honorable mentions from other amazing esports.
(Figures collected from esportsearnings.com)
Honorable Mentions
Bugha - Fortnite - $3,030,300
Kyle 'Bugha' Giersdorf won the 2019 Fortnite World Cup's Solo competition and won over $3 Million. He is the youngest Esport player to ever become a millionaire from prize money and considering this was just his first tournament, he will go a lot further in his career.
Xyp9x - Counter-Strike Global Offensive - $1,476,691
Andreas 'Xyp9x' Hojsleth is the richest CSGO player in the world. He has amassed just under $1.5 million in earning and most are thanks to Astralis' 3 Major victories. His 4 teammates are just behind him in CSGO's richest rankings but he is the highest of them all thanks to his short 1.6 career. He is still the 50th richest esports player of all time.
Faker - League of Legends - $1,217,873
Lee 'Faker' Sang-hyeok is considered the best League of Legends player ever. The mid-laner from SK Telecom T1 is also the richest League player ever. His winning amounting over a million is primarily from his three Worlds victories. Even with that, he is the 66th highest earning esports player of all time.