For centuries, the human race strived to achieve a dual-purpose goal that boggled the finest brains our 17th, 18th and 19th Century ancestors had to offer: “How do we compete professionally at sports while sitting at home in our underwear drinking caffeinated chemical concoctions and snacking?
At last, towards the turn of the last century, the brightest sparks leading the charge of video game development found the perfect solution – esports.
Ever since the first recorded video game tournament in 1972, when Stamford University students competed at the archaic 1962 video game ‘Spacewar’ for a year-long subscription to Rolling Stone, esports has become a growing phenomenon that now describes a market worth a ridiculous $1.6 billion.
This explosion was less of a nuclear, instantaneous, and world-shattering bang, and more of a cartoony gunpowder trail leading to a bundle of TNT that slowly fizzled towards the 21st century and then went, well, KABOOOM! In fact, the term ‘esports’ wasn’t actually coined until the year 2000 by Park Jie-Won, who was the Korean minister for culture, sports and tourism at the time.
If any of you more curious/daydreamy souls are wondering how he’s doing now, let me save you from Googling him, he’s doing great and is now the head of the Korean Intelligence service. Sidebar: if that isn’t proof that video games make you smarter, I don’t know what is!
With the dawn of competitive FPS games such as Counter-Strike and MOBAs like StarCraft in the late 1990s, the seriousness of competitive video gaming really kicked off. Since then, especially with the meteoric rise of streaming sites like Twitch, the popularity of watching/playing/betting on esports has skyrocketed and is accelerating every second.
There’s now a wonderfully rich selection of popular esports games that are played every day by millions of people around the world. There have also been lots of games that have fallen by the wayside and are no longer played competitively like they once were.
On this page, we’ve listed the 20 esports games that have paid out the most prize money over the years. We’ve worked this out by looking at the size of prize pools given to competitors and given you the D/L on each one. So, stop reading here and start reading down, down below – go, go, go!
What makes a Game an Esport?
Of course, we won’t get very far without defining the term “esports”. An esport, also sometimes formatted as “eSport” or “e-sport”, is any activity that has teams of players competing over one or more video games. At the professional level, tournaments are played in arenas for huge prize funds – just like in football or basketball.
Put another way, it’s exactly what our parents told us would never happen – people getting paid to play video games all day long.
While creative gamers will be able to turn any video game into a competition, esports tend to involve titles from one or two particular genres. These include sport esports such as Rocket League and FIFA…urgh, sport esports, what a terrible phrase. Ahem, these also include first-person shooters, like Call of Duty and CS:GO, and games from the relatively new battle-royale genre, Fortnite and PUBG included.
You might also find events based around the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena or MOBA genre, such as League of Legends, and the truly ancient Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre, which tend to focus on StarCraft II at the highest levels. Don’t be disheartened if your favourite game hasn’t shown up in competition yet, though – esports is still an evolving industry.
As a final point, it’s worth mentioning that esports are almost invariably contested by human opponents, rather than the AI that gamers sometimes play against. Although, let’s be honest. We’ve all cursed the computer’s skill (read: cheating) at some point or another, and we’re never guaranteed to beat a particular boss at the first attempt.
Now, on with the list…
The Complete List of Esports Games
Contained below is everything you need to know about esports video games, from the year they came out to the most famous tournaments and players out there. We can’t help you get involved in professional competitions (that requires years of practice) but we can at least give you another reason to sit in front of the TV.
So, here we go. Introducing –
1) Dota 2 Esports:
| Release Year | 2013 | |
| Genre | MOBA | |
| Top Tournaments | The International, World Electronic Sports Games, ESL One | |
| Top Players | Yatoro (Team Spirit), XinQ (PSG.LGD), Puppey (Team Secret) | |
| Top Streamers | Stray228, BeyondTheSummit, cheatbanned, Rota2RuHub, Dendi |
While it’s always referred to simply as Dota, Valve’s MOBA actually has a full name – Defense of the Ancients. It’s an acronym that, for some reason, was phased out shortly after the first entry stopped being a mod for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, back in 2003. Released ten years later, the second instalment in the franchise is one of the most famous esport games in the world, offering truly enormous prize funds to players.
Per month, Dota 2 players sacrifice around 326.3m real-world hours to mastering this title, which tasks two teams of five players with destroying their opponent’s Ancient, while defending their own. It’s a cynical bit of archaeological devastation that we’re happy to ignore just because watching Dota 2’s biggest event – The International – can be such a joy. Better yet, it’s free to tune in to, via the Dota 2 client.
In 2021, The International had a prize kitty of just over $40m, a sum that is crowdfunded from the in-game Battle Pass. Generating a great deal of attention from its most popular Twitch streamers, which include Stray228, AdmiralBulldog, and Dendi, The International has taken place in five different countries to date, with the most recent edition visiting the Arena Națională in Romania. The Russian outfit Team Spirit claimed that particular win.
Overall, Dota 2 is a bit of an icon of the eSports world. With more than one hundred heroes to play with, it’s easy to see why.
2) CS:GO Esports:
| Release Year | 2012 | |
| Genre | First-person Shooter | |
| Top Tournaments | Intel Extreme Masters, ECS, E-League, ESL Pro League, MLG Major, DreamHack | |
| Top Players | s1mple (NaVi), m0NESY, NiKo (both G2) | |
| Top Streamers | PGL, BLASTPremier, Gaules, s1mple, pgl_csgo |
We see more of most comets than we do Valve releases. Unveiled in 2012, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) is one of just three games Gabe Newell’s PC goliath has built in the last decade, alongside Dota 2, Half-Life: Alyx, and the mobile game Artifact, which isn’t really worth a mention. It was announced in 2018 to an audible sound of disappointment from the assembled crowd and subsequently abandoned in 2021.
CS:GO is currently the most-played game on Steam, boasting a daily peak of almost one million players. It’s a fairly simple title about either planting or defusing a bomb, depending on whether you’re playing as the Terrorists or Counter-Terrorists. However, there are actually nine ways to play, varying from hostage rescue/capturing to playing with only a single weapon (and a knife) in low gravity.
It’s debatable whether CS:GO is better known for its active marketplace, which is worth several billion dollars at the last estimate (a single AK-47 with four stickers went for $150,000) or its thriving esports scene. In any case, CS:GO’s primary tournament series is the $1m CS:GO Major Championships, which actually takes place during occasions like the Intel Extreme Masters.
Inevitably, CS: GO also has a large community on Twitch, with a cohort of presenters that includes Gaules, s1mple, and gafallen.
3) Fortnite Esports:
| Release Year | 2017 | |
| Genre | Battle Royale | |
| Top Tournaments | Fornite World Cup, Fortnite Champion Series | |
| Top Players | Arkhram, Rehx (both 100 Thieves), EpikWhale (NRG Esports) | |
| Top Streamers | Ninja, Loserfruit, Clix, Mongraal, NateHill |
One of the more recent releases on this list, Fortnite has become less of a video game and more of a cultural phenomenon over the past five years. It’s a battle royale or ‘last person standing’-style game that appeared shortly after the similar title PlayerUknown’s Battlegrounds and cornered a demographic that was being underserved by the genre, namely, younger, mobile users.
It’s colourful and goofy and a truly bottomless pit of marketing material from all sorts of industries. Resident Evil, Star Wars, Street Fighter, and Naruto have all crossed over with Fortnite, as have more than 120 other companies or franchises. Even fashion houses like Balenciaga have gone to great lengths to get their products in front of Fortnite’s estimated audience of 350m. That’s twice that of the Super Bowl.
Oddly enough, Fortnite’s esports scene actually began on Twitch and YouTube, with DIY tournaments from personalities such as Keemstar and Ninja. Since 2019, though, the Fortnite World Cup has taken up the mantle of putting the game on the esports map, offering a $30m prize pot to be shared among the winners of its Solos and Duos events. The lone staging of the Fortnite World Cup, in 2019, was won by player Bugha, who claimed $3m.
“Victory Royale”, indeed.
4) League Of Legends Esports:
| Release Year | 2009 | |
| Genre | MOBA | |
| Top Tournaments | LoL World Championship, LoL European Championship, LoL Championship Series, LCK (Korea), Pro League (China), Mid-Season Invitational | |
| Top Players | Keria, Gumayusi, Faker (all team T1) | |
| Top Streamers | Riot Games, loltyler1, elxokas, YoDa, Gosu |
Riot Games’ 2009 creation League of Legends (LoL) is the second MOBA game on our list, with a history in esports going back to 2011 – not quite the grandfather of competitive gaming but definitely a fun uncle. The game has the League of Legends World Championship at the centre of its esports calendar. The 2021 Championship – in Reykjavik – was won by Chinese team Edward Gaming.
Like Dota 2, LoL is a 5v5 game about destroying an opponent’s property, in this case, the Nexus. Players each control a single Champion from a range of classes, including Juggernaut, Marksman, and Skirmisher. They also take on a role depending on where they are placed on the map. These are Top, Mid, and Bottom Laner, Support, and Jungler. Confused? That’s absolutely fine.
LoL is an involved, difficult game with a notoriously impatient player base, largely due to the anonymity users enjoy and, again, the steep learning curve. On the plus side, it’s also a cosplayer’s paradise, as lots of the characters – like “loose cannon”, Jinx – are easy and fun to recreate. In fact, much like Harley Quinn in DC Comics, Jinx is one of the most cosplayed characters in the world.
League of Legends can easily boast upwards of 700,000 concurrent players, many of which join in to watch Twitch streamer loltyler1, who masquerades as an extremely angry – yet entertaining – Jungler.
5) Arena Of Valor Esports:
| Release Year | 2016 | |
| Genre | MOBA | |
| Top Tournaments | Arena of Valor International Championship, Arena of Valor World Cup | |
| Top Players | HuaHai, Alan, QianShi (all eStar Gaming) | |
| Top Streamers | AoVArabia, CyberGamesArena, vevina53, ArenaOfValor_BR, NOELXCVII |
If you happen to live in the West, Arena of Valor might seem like a bit of an oddity. For one, that’s not its real name. Arena of Valor is the worldwide version of Honor of Kings. Here are a few other facts that might blow your head clean off. Honor of Kings is the most played, most downloaded, and most lucrative mobile game on earth. It can currently rely on 200m players per month and up to 80m logins per day.
This obvious discrepancy between audience size and Western popularity comes from the fact that Honor of Kings gets most of its players from its native China. Of course, that makes little difference to esports fans, who can still get a sizeable helping of Honor of Kings – or Arena of Valor – in Europe, the United States, and beyond. Developer Tencent is eyeing a huge expansion of its esports program, too.
So, while the associated International Championship and World Cup currently attract the most eyeballs, Tencent wants to introduce a five-stage tournament with a prize pool of up to $10m. For budding pros, an all-comers amateur stage could pave the way for a more serious career in competitive gaming. You’ll almost definitely be up against some of the best Arena of Valor players in the world, though.
As far as its format is concerned, Arena of Valor is another 5×5 MOBA with the addition of boss monsters. Players also start on the same footing, level-wise, at the outset of each match. Sadly, the game has a limited presence on Twitch, ranking at number 767.
6) PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Esports:
| Release Year | 2017 | |
| Genre | Battle Royale | |
| Top Tournaments | PUBG Champions League, PUBG Weekly Series | |
| Top Players | ZpYan1 (NewHappy-Esports), TGLTN (Soniqs), Pio (Gen.G) | |
| Top Streamers | TGLTN, WackyJacky, ChocoTaco, Danucd, DrDisRespect |
Ostensibly named after somebody spilt wine on their caps lock key, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS developer KRAFTON (formerly Bluehole) seems to have soured on the capital letters shortly after the 2017 release. Now called PUBG: Battlegrounds, this battle royale was designed from the ground up for permanent display on Twitch, YouTube, and just about every other live-streaming platform.
Compared to many of the other titles in this guide, it’s fair to say that PUBG: Battlegrounds’ esports offering is rather muted. Combined, the PUBG Champions League and the PUBG Weekly Series don’t break $1m in prize money, with the former putting up $627,836 for the 2022 edition in Shanghai, China. In fact, due to the involvement of Tencent, PUBG: Battlegrounds has an increasingly large presence in Asia.
As mentioned, streamed footage has always been important to PUBG’s identity. Top presenter DrDisRespect has become a controversial figure in recent times but still attracts hundreds of thousands of views on any given stream. Otherwise known as Herschel Beahm IV, DrDisRespect has won awards at the Esports Industry Awards and the Esports Awards, both in the Streamer of the Year category.
7) StarCraft II Esports:
| Release Year | 2010 | |
| Genre | RTS | |
| Top Tournaments | ESL Pro | |
| Top Players | Serral (ENCE), HeroMarine (mouz), AceRider (N/A) | |
| Top Streamers | wintergaming, Wardiii, RotterdaM08, HeroMarine, tvcrank |
The ultimate in nerd bait, StarCraft II is arguably why we have esports at all. As hinted at in the intro, the term ‘esports’ was coined in South Korea, about the time the original StarCraft began to receive 24hr coverage on TV. Compare that to the UK, which managed just two years of esports TV coverage in the 2000s before shows about baking took their rightful place at the top of the TV mountain.
StarCraft II is a real-time strategy game or RTS. Ironically, despite being almost perfect for esports competition, possessing mechanics that rarely go beyond smashing two (or more) armies together, RTS games remain rare on the esports scene, enshrining StarCraft II as the lonely king of this particular genre. The game itself revolves around the ongoing feud between the Terran, Protoss, and the despairingly ugly Zerg.
Now a global phenomenon, StarCraft II’s esports season runs from May to February. Its itinerary actually underwent a revamp back in 2020 when Blizzard joined forces with DreamHack and ESL to create the ESL Pro Tour. This ultimately forced a change in format to weekly events, with the final shifted to the Intel Extreme Masters instead of Blizzard’s flagship community event, BlizzCon.
Zerg player Serral is currently the top StarCraft II player in the world. The Finn currently holds an impressive win/loss tally of 78/17.
8) PUBG Mobile Esports:
| Release Year | 2018 | |
| Genre | Battle Royale | |
| Top Tournaments | PUBG Mobile Club Open, PUBG Mobile Campus Championship, PUBG Mobile National Championships, PUBG Mobile Pro League, PUBG Mobile Global Championship | |
| Top Players | Gonzo (Konina Power), Paraboy (Nova XQF), Luxxy (Bigetron RA) | |
| Top Streamers | al3od, brg2022, HypoAimGaming, SOLSO1796, todosgamerstv |
Here we go again. PUBG Mobile is almost identical to PUBG: Battlegrounds but, as it’s a later development, the former title does have a few enhancements over the PC version. For starters, the mobile game has the PlayLab and Arena game modes, among others, as well as a ranking system for solo play (PUBG: Battlegrounds only ranks squads). It’s also free-to-play, whereas PUBG: Battlegrounds is a premium game.
Currently in its 2.0 season, the PUBG Mobile esports competition is arranged in a pyramid with the Club Open and Campus Championship at the bottom and the Global Championship at the top. This structure allows for just one entry per person, per year, meaning that PUBG Mobile is a bit of an exclusive club, as far as finding fame and glory is concerned. On the plus side, even the lower tiers have nice prize pools, at around £4,000.
Just like its bigger brother, PUBG Mobile is a game that mimics the format of the 2001 Japanese film Battle Royale, chiefly, by tasking the player with killing everybody except themselves. The smash-hit book and film, The Hunger Games, was reportedly inspired by – even plagiarised if reports online are to be believed – Kinji Fukasaku’s cynical nightmare, as well.
You’ll be pleased to know that the now-iconic winning phrase “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner” is retained in PUBG Mobile.
9) Overwatch Esports:
| Release Year | 2016 | |
| Genre | FPS | |
| Top Tournaments | Overwatch League, Overwatch World Cup, Overwatch Contenders | |
| Top Players | Profit (Seoul Dynasty), Fleta, Void (both Shanghai Dragons), Carpe (Philadelphia Fusion), Shu (LA Gladiators) | |
| Top Streamers | CDNThe3rd, A_Seagull, dafran, Emongg, m0xyy |
Despite the fact that there’s nothing unique about a first-person shooter in esports, Blizzard’s Overwatch managed to do something quite different without really changing much at all. Perhaps it’s because the game is character-driven. Perhaps it’s because everybody is achingly pretty – even Winston, the talking gorilla. Perhaps it’s just because it isn’t another brown and green military shooter.
In any case, Overwatch was the best selling game of 2016 and, with Overwatch 2 on the horizon, its claim to untold riches seems set in stone (though the second instalment was delayed, along with Diablo 4). It’s a 6v6 game that boasts a handful of special modes. These include the best-of-three Control, which revolves around claiming territory, and the bomb-carrying Escort.
Overwatch’s path to pro esports begins right in the main game, via the Overwatch Open Division, which anybody can enter. It’s a long haul to stardom, though, as players must reach level 25 before they can begin playing competitively. Still, Blizzard’s FPS is somewhat unique on this list for clearly advertising a route to professional play on its website, a career that can sometimes seem unattainable.
Due to its age, Overwatch’s star has dimmed somewhat but it still ranks at #36 on the list of most-watched Twitch games.
10) Hearthstone Esports:
| Release Year | 2014 | |
| Genre | TCG | |
| Top Tournaments | Hearthstone Masters Qualifiers, Heartstone Grandmasters, Hearthstone Masters Tour | |
| Top Players | Posesi (N/A), Glory (N/A), Gaby (N/A) | |
| Top Streamers | SilverName, playheartstonekr, LenGol0vach, Thijs, nl_Kripp |
A few years ago, the digital Trading Card Game (TCG) genre was all the rage. In 2017, The Elder Scrolls: Legends and Gwent: The Witcher Card Game were released to a market that had barely any idea what they were. After all, other than Magic: The Gathering, Blizzard’s Hearthstone was one of the few mainstream representatives of the TCG throughout the early 2010s.
Easy to pick up yet surprisingly deep, Hearthstone is all the evidence you need that anything can be turned into an esport. As far as esports is concerned, the game’s competition structure is composed of three linked tiers, namely, the Masters Qualifiers, Grandmasters, and Masters Tour. At the lowest level, thirty weekly tournaments are hosted by Blizzard. The winners of each of these are then invited to the Masters Tour.
In the upper echelons, players have the opportunity to share in a piggy bank worth $500,000. However, with a gruelling pair of eight-week seasons to get through first, it’s a porcine payday that doesn’t come easily. Blizzard broadcasts all Grandmasters matches on YouTube during the weekends, which does seem a little unusual given Twitch’s dominance of the space and YouTube’s long-standing troubles with attracting gamers.
An interesting tidbit, here. Hearthstone was made in the free off-the-shelf game engine, Unity 3D.
11) Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege Esports:
| Release Year | 2015 | |
| Genre | FPS | |
| Top Tournaments | Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, Pro League, Six Invitational, Six Major, DreamHack | |
| Top Players | Psycho (Ninjas in Pyjamas), Paluh (Team Liquid), Shaiiko (BDS Esport) | |
| Top Streamers | Rainbow6, R6esportsBR, Rainbow6FR, RazaH, Rainbow6Bravo |
We’re closing on fifty video games in the Tom Clancy virtual saga. However, the trend of attaching the late author’s name to various media actually goes back to the 1987 Amiga game The Hunt for Red October, based on the book (not the movie) of the same name. Excluding upcoming titles, of which there are five, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege came out six titles ago, back in 2015.
So, what is it? Like CS:GO, players are given the role of either an attacker or a defender, with objectives that range from hostage rescue to bomb defusing. The level design includes a remarkable amount of destructibility, which allows for strategies that destroy walls, RoboCop-style. The game debuted its first esports league in 2016 (Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Pro League) in association with ESL.
Siege’s esports schedule is packed to the gills. In May 2022, for instance, there were up to 14 games a day, with some teams playing twice per session. The current league structure also includes some names you might not expect, such as Wolves, otherwise known as the English football team, Wolverhampton Wanderers. Something else you might not expect is that the 2022 North American League began in Sweden.
Figure that one out.
12) Rocket League Esports:
| Release Year | 2015 | |
| Genre | Sport | |
| Top Tournaments | Rocket League Championship Series, CRL World Championship | |
| Top Players | Atomic, JKnaos (both G2), M0nkey_M00n (BDS) | |
| Top Streamers | RocketLeague, Kaydop, LevelNextGG, RocketBaguette, NRGgg |
Borne from the much more impressive-sounding Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars of 2008, Rocket League is football with cars that can fly. By far the most unique title on our list so far, Psyonix’s bit of mad science also includes options to play ice hockey and basketball, also with cars. Better still, you can dress your vehicle up with hats, aerials, rims, and all sorts of other trinkets.
Rocket League’s esport program is based around the RLCS or Rocket League Championship Series, which is broadcast regularly on Twitch. In fact, viewers who link their Rocket League and Twitch accounts can sometimes claim in-game rewards just for tuning in. There’s also the much more low-key CRL World Championship, a university-level tournament that pits Europe against the USA.
Due to the extreme difficulty of some of Rocket League’s more acrobatic feats, ascending to the top of the Rocket League world is quite a feat indeed. Having said that, there are plenty of pro-level streamers on YouTube who play – and win – uneven matches (e.g. 5v1) to practice and/or show off to viewers. It’s definitely a labour of vehicular love but, at the amateur level, there’s no shame in just driving into things.
13) Apex Legends Esports:
| Release Year | 2019 | |
| Genre | Battle Royale, FPS | |
| Top Tournaments | Apex Legends Pro League, Apex Legends Challenger Circuit | |
| Top Players | Albralelie (TSM FTX), SirDel (GMT Esports), Taisheen (SCARZ EU) | |
| Top Streamers | NICKMERCS, TSM_ImperialHAL, aceu, kato_junichi0817, playapex |
EA’s attempt at cracking the battle royale genre, Apex Legends is a 2019 free-to-play game that’s actually considered one of the best shooters on the market today. Its esports program, which sits under the umbrella of the Apex Legends Global Series, is currently in its second season, offering a share of $5m in prize funds for anybody who makes their way through the Challenger Circuit to the Pro League.
Apex Legends didn’t attract the immediate fame of Fortnite but it still pulls in an average of 190,000 players per month. To put that figure into perspective, fellow Steam game PUBG: Battlegrounds can only count on an extra 20,000 logins over any 30 day period. It plays in a similar fashion to Overwatch and Fortnite, in that it’s a hero-based FPS. However, it has a distinctly more sci-fi vibe to its environments and outfits.
Apex Legends’ main claim to fame in the esports niche is that it has performed significantly better than the Battlefield franchise, which is at its lowest point in a long time. The critically-panned Battlefield 2042 started development as a battle royale game, presumably to re-ignite interest in the beleaguered FPS. Sadly, as of mid-2022, it rarely pulls in more than a few thousand players per day.
14) CrossFire Esports:
| Release Year | 2007 | |
| Genre | FPS | |
| Top Tournaments | CrossFire Stars, CrossFire Invitational, CrossFire Pro League, CrossFire Stars Grand Finals | |
| Top Players | DBQ, N9 (both Vici Gaming), 18 (Qing Jiu Club) | |
| Top Streamers | (English language only) CFOnline, ancientmanbrad, CFiSkillzZ, omgpeanut |
CrossFire is esports’ resident misfit. For one, this South Korean FPS was released way back in 2007, the same year the first Assassin’s Creed appeared on shelves (which has 12 main games), so it’s way behind the curve, graphically. Of course, that has never made much of a difference to its estimated one billion players to date. It has sufficient fame in its native Asia to have been the topic of a movie and a TV serial.
Created by Smilegate, a name that should be familiar to fans of the popular MMO Lost Ark, CrossFire commands a concurrent audience of about 8m players. That’s a mite larger than the 1,343 people currently logged in to Battlefield 2042. Inevitably, CrossFire’s esports schedule is well-established, consisting of three areas of competition – CrossFire Stars, CrossFire Invitational, and the CrossFire Pro League.
In 2021, CrossFire reached the 10th edition of the CrossFire Stars Grand Finals, which came with a chunk of interesting stats, courtesy of its marketing division. There were 634 CFS competitors from 17 countries in 2021, all battling for a prize fund of $860,000. There’s little chance of CrossFire’s renown dying off, either. Even years after its release, CrossFire has held the title of the most lucrative online game in the world.
15) SMITE Esports:
| Release Year | 2014 | |
| Genre | Third-person MOBA | |
| Top Tournaments | SMITE Pro League, SMITE World Championship | |
| Top Players | BaRRaCCuDDa (Renegades), JeffHindla, Andinster (both Spacestation Gaming) | |
| Top Streamers | SmiteGame, Weak3n, Zapman, Incon, fineokay |
SMITE, usually expressed in all capitals, has a 30m strong player base and an esports competition that’s worth around $400,000 a year in prize money. The game is a third-person MOBA, the only example of its kind on this list, which basically means that it possesses the same kind of gameplay as League of Legends but with a pursuing camera like that in Dragon Age and other console-style RPGs.
Along with Rocket League, SMITE is a BAFTA award-winning game, albeit in the budget-sounding category of eSports Audience Appreciation. In comparison, Rocket League claimed the entire Sport field against FIFA 16 and Football Manager, as well as the top Evolving Game. It’s hard to argue with industry awards, though, especially given that Smite toppled Dota 2, CS:GO, and Hearthstone on its way to the podium.
Smite’s esports showcase is the SMITE Pro League, which leads into the SMITE World Championship. It has a small number of competitors, with a meagre 16 teams at the opening Challenger Circuit, but the overall series is broken down into a complex mess of phases (three of them) and best-of-three matches that are a little bit difficult to get to grips with. It’s a novel entry on our list, in any case.
16) Valorant Esports:
| Release Year | 2020 | |
| Genre | FPS | |
| Top Tournaments | Valorant Ignition Series, VCT Challengers, Valorant Champions Tour, 2023 schedule TBA. | |
| Top Players | Shahzam (Sentinels), Buzz (Vision Strikers), Patiphan (X10) | |
| Top Streamers | TenZ, tarik, Trymacs, Squadkoi, Kyedae |
Valorant esports both does and doesn’t exist. In its current form, developer Riot Games offers a smattering of tournaments and events such as the Valorant Ignition Series and the Valorant Champions Tour. While these are mostly professional, the game’s esports offering can’t really compare to that provided by Riot’s MOBA League of Legends.
As of 2023, Riot Games hopes to completely overhaul its esports product to give it a bit more structure. This will add the following things (deep breath): an in-game route to professional play, domestic and international leagues, sponsored and global tournaments, and “game-changers”, which are events aimed at female players. It’s an exciting development for a sadly underserved video game.
As far as gameplay is concerned, Valorant is yet another team and character-based FPS that takes its cues from the Counter-Strike series. There’s a bomb – the Spike – and two opposing teams. It distinguishes itself a bit by stretching individual games over 25 rounds of 100 seconds, with 13 victories required for an overall win. Just like Valve’s always-beige classic, it’s also free-to-play.
17) Magic: The Gathering: Arena Esports:
| Release Year | 2018 | |
| Genre | TCG | |
| Top Tournaments | No esports events. Ranked Play, Play-ins, Qualifiers, Arena Championship | |
| Top Players | Eli Kassis (N/A), Zach Dunn (N/A), Yudai Miyano (N/A) | |
| Top Streamers | Magic, crokeyz, NumotTheNummy, LSV, aspiringspike |
There are few guarantees in the world but one sticks out – if you’re a fan of Magic: The Gathering, you’re probably single. It’s the source of plenty of warning signs about personal hygiene at conventions and, also, a curious trend for poorly-fitting trousers and builder’s bums. Enough of the jibes, though, Magic: The Gathering has a 30-year history at the top of the TCG pile and an estimated 40m players.
It’s not easy to get a handle on exactly what’s going on with Magic: The Gathering’s esports, with several players complaining that publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC) is doing everything it can to banish the entire concept of professional play. The official Twitter account for MTG states that the game is not “designed to support competitive Magic as a career path”. It’s a casual game, in other words.
The reason we’re including it here is that Arena will retain competitions with prize money of up to $200,000. These events will have a traditional tournament structure including league rankings, qualifiers, and a final. It’s a disappointing direction for a game with such potential in esports, and one that has been digitised for play on computers since 1997. Still, WotC’s behaviour has been a mystery for some time now.
18) FIFA Esports:
| Release Year | Yearly Release | |
| Genre | Sport | |
| Top Tournaments | FIFA Global Series | |
| Top Players | Tekkz (Fnatic), Msdossary (Team Falcons), Chris (N/A) | |
| Top Streamers | FrankoNo1, Jonakinho, r3ptimaty, fofito_estevam, RevanPlay_ |
With 325m sales, FIFA is a cornerstone of the video game industry, known as much for its annual release schedule as the number of TVs its players have sent to the scrapyard. Unfortunately, as with any game that has a throwaway culture of regular releases, it’s not easy to pin down the number of players FIFA actually has. EA claims a figure of 9m for FIFA 22 though, placing it 12th on the best sellers list for last year.
FIFA, like all sports games, is a natural esport and has been since the FIFAe World Cup was established in 2004. Its main competition is truly enormous but it can ultimately be boiled down to 1v1 or 2v2 matches arranged in regional qualifiers, the 32-team Team of the Year Cup, the 24-team Team of the Season Cup and, finally, the FIFAe Club World Cup. There’s also a Global Series Open, just to confuse matters.
Honestly, we don’t even have to stop there. EA has also created the eChampions League Knockouts and Finals, the FIFAe Nations Cup, the FGS22 Challenge, and the Unicef eSoccerAid. Put another way, FIFA has by far the most complete esports product in the world today, and prize pots can reach up to $16.5m for the final event of the FIFAe Club World Cup.
