I cannot tell you precisely about esports because it is a vast topic and I might not cover everything. And this is for sure what I can say for sure is that “E-sports” which are computer sports, has a big money behind them. The League of Legends Championship Series (LoL Esport) in 2012 had a total prize pool of 2.2 million dollars, and in 2015 it was $2.1 million, but when we add related events to this number we get a prize pool of 4 million dollars. An excellent example of this is World Championships 2014, which had a prize pool of 2.05 million dollars, but I think that these numbers will increase over the next five years.
The LoL World Championship 2015 was watched by 36 million people online with maximum peak of 14 million viewers at one time. This is more than Super Bowl in US or FA cup final in England for example. Korea held this World Championship and the winner was SK Telecom T1 (Team of Lee Sang-hyeok) with 3:20 KDA (Kill/Death/Assist). The runner up was KOO Tigers (Team of Song Kyung-ho) which had better statistics than any other participant in the whole championship.
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What is the viewership of LOL Esport?
When we talk about viewership in the context of E-sports, we have an interview with Benedict “Hyphy” Lim from Singapore who is a professional Dota 2 player with Cloud9. In this interview he says that Dota 2 major events can get even up to million concurrent viewers on Twitch and 15 million live views online. He also explains that for players like him, the salary is around 5k to 15k USD per month, which is a bit lower than the average salary in Singapore.
In 2013 LoL Esport player Matt Elento from Team Liquid was interviewed by BBC News and he says that he gets around 500 dollars per week or 10500 dollars per year as a salary. These numbers might be small for regular people but not for esports pros since the prize pool at LoL World Championship in 2015 was 2 million dollars, making it possible for players to win that much money in just under 4 games.
What are few LOL Esport alike games?
There are many sorts of esports such as League of Legends (LoL) eSport which is most popular, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm and Dota 2 International Championships. E-sports has a big money behind it, but what are the most successful games? I have some data which is League of Legends has around 70 million active players per month. From this amount half of these players are playing 5 matches per day. We also see that the League of Legends World Championship, in 2012 had 8 teams with 4 players each. Then the prize pool was 2.2 million dollars and in 2015 it was 2.1 million dollars. There are around 100 games per year with a total prize pool of 30 million dollars, but a most popular one is League of Legends with a 4 million dollar prize pool at World Championship 2015. Another big E-sports game is Dota 2, with around 1 million players per month. The biggest one at Dota 2 International Championships is the prize pool was 18.4 million dollars with 5 million for first place.
From all these numbers we can see that there are ample money behind LOL E-sport industry and it’s increasing. I think that this growth will continue in following years. Prize pool for this event was 1 million dollars. So, the competition is enormous, which is why many people are trying to create e-sport events for different games. E-sports is growing these days, but only time will tell if it will become mainstream.
