And it’ll only keep increasing.
Since League’s release in 2009 and eSports start in 2010, Riot has held 1888 tournaments. This may seem like an extremely large number for 7 years, and it definitely is. In comparison, DotA 2 has only held 766 tournaments in 6 years. In total, Riot’s prize pool across these 1888 tournaments is nearing $42 million. This ranks them #2 among every other eSport. The top earning player is Faker, who anyone that watches League probably knows. In conjunction with this, the top earning country is the Republic of Korea, where Faker hails from.
League’s $42 million is only trumped by another MOBA, DotA 2. DotA 2 has granted $84 million more than League has given out, making their total calculate to $126 million. Most of this is crowdfunded, which is why a lot of DotA’s prize pools reach $1 million easily. Other games that League trumps in prize money are CS:GO, StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm, with $4.5 million, $18.6 million, and $32.8 million more respectively. HotS and StarCraft both have Korea as the highest earning region, while DotA’s region is China and CS:GO’s region is Sweden. The stereotype that Koreans are always the best at games isn’t always true, it seems.
Another interesting thing is the original DotA bringing all of this into existence. Defense of the Ancients was a mod for WarCraft III based on a StarCraft map. Its gameplay is very similar to what DotA 2 is now, aside from the limited resources compared to DotA 2’s utilization of the Source engine. While it was never huge as an eSports, it gave birth to the MOBA genre as it is today.
