How much do eSport players make?

A job of a professional gamer does not sound weird anymore. In just several years, the esports industry developed into a profitable and prestigious ever-growing business that brings decent incomes. Unlike most traditional sports, professional gaming did not stagnate during the lockdown in 2020, and all people involved could count on getting even more earnings than before.

Considering the fact that the sports betting ban was repealed, esports became one of the several disciplines available for making wagers (More information about betting sites on Super Betting). Let’s discuss how esports leagues and players get their salaries, what the income depends on, and the actual figures.

How Leagues Make Money?

The primary source of income for the esports clubs is sponsorship money. According to Forbes, global cybersport gained $4,5 billion of investments in 2018 and later attracted large brands for cooperation. For instance, Nike released a League of Legends line that brought millions of dollars to the Chinese club they signed with. Such revenues allow leagues to recruit esports players and sign guaranteed contracts with them. Besides, transfer deals are also typical for esports: clubs ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ athletes. At the moment, there are no transfer limitations determined by video game publishers who manage all operations of the esports clubs.

Event organizers’ wages

Media rights are one of the main pitfalls in the professional gaming industry. Some proprietors do not allow anyone to organize esports tournaments using their video games and reserve all broadcasting and organization rights for themselves. However, the other companies agree to share the media rights with the side organizers, and broadcasting companies pay the media rights money. According to the records of 2019, the year before the coronavirus pandemic, $251 million of the $1.1 billion total revenue of the eSports industry were gained from the media rights.

Earnings from the fanbase: merchandising and tickets

If we again check the cybersports industry’s revenues in 2019, we will find out that the industry collected the profit of $103,000,000 due to ticket sales and merchandising goods. Tickets’ price starts from $10–$20, but the most significant events’ finals can cost about $300. Merchandise sales in esports organizations attract many sponsors and famous brands who want to cooperate with top names.

How professional gamers make money?

The revenues of cybersports leagues allow them to provide clubs and their teams with more or less decent wages. Besides a lump sum that players get monthly according to their contracts with clubs, they receive most prize money if they win tournaments. In cybersports, clubs do not obtain much from prize cash, and usually, it is divided between players, with some more extensive amounts for the team captains.

Besides, top competitors also sign with large corporations and participate in advertising campaigns. One of the most typical ways to earn for professional gamers is to organize live streams via YouTube, Twitch, or other streaming platforms. Some athletes managed to develop their brand to build up a huge fan base who follow them on various social media, including the most profitable ones like Instagram and Tik Tok.

How much does an average professional gamer make?

Being a part of a high-level league with a hefty amount of sponsorship cash, an experienced competitor can be eligible to sign a contract with a $10,000–$15,000 monthly salary. This is a top professional gamer’s salary in a widely promoted club like Virtus pro, so such amounts are not rather typical. Standard wages vary from $1,000 to $5,000 per month, but some young clubs can pay less; the minimum salary recorded in esports is about $500 per month. Esports superstars can count on fixed contracts with $30,000–$35,000 monthly, but only a few of them.

What do professional gamers do for a salary?

The gamers’ salary depends, of course, on their performance and experience, but as soon as they become a part of a team, they have to follow the conditions determined by their contracts. This includes regular visits to the training sessions that can last for several hours daily. Besides, the work implies being away from home for quite a long time because tournaments are organized worldwide, and participants gather at offline arenas with the top technological features. Thus, regular payments that an athlete receives include the duty of traveling a lot and living in co-housings with teammates. Individual training is also a must. If any sponsorships imply involving all club members, esports players must also participate in them.

However, the primary duty is to participate in esports tournaments. It is a way to maintain a valuable player’s status in a team and makes a player more recognizable and respectable. The esports industry’s reputation gives a player a chance to be noticed by a significant esports organization and a chance to move to a better and stronger team with more considerable esports revenue.

What is required for esports players to earn more?

The winnings rate is the first thing that matters, of course. However, a beginning esports pro will not be eligible to gain multi-million prize earnings unless they have additional skills. First of all, speaking English is required, and other languages will be advantageous. Besides, professional gaming is not about entertainment and involves exhausting training hours. Finally, being a person recognizable in the media might also help: esports teams of the upper echelon are willing to include the overexposed players in their draft rosters.

Prize pools of the most significant esports events

Different competitions offer winning teams prize pots from hundreds to millions of dollars. For instance, Riot Games, the developers of the Valorant shooter, divide the events into three parts: community tournaments with prize pools up to $10,000, medium-size events organized by side companies with a tournament prize pool up to $50,000, and major events hosted by the most influential leagues.

If we check the upcoming Counter-Strike Global Offensive events, we will see that their prize pools vary from $50,000 to $200,000. For example, the Elisa Invitational Spring tournament offers $162,000 for a winning team.

The biggest tournament prize is available at Dota Internationals, the major Dota 2 events; you can see the maximum awards that companies ever offered to the esports tournament participants in the image below.

Usually, the prize is split between the team members. Traditionally, a team consists of 5-6 players, if we speak of the most popular games like Dota 2, CS: GO, League of Legends, or Overwatch. Thus, you speculate that each competitor can earn from $2,000 to about $6,800,000; however, it is not quite so.

Allocation of the tournament prizes

Unlike many people may think, a winning team gets the total money prize, but this is not quite so. It all depends on the specific tournament, its aims, and primarily on the organizer’s purposes and budget. For instance, the International, which we already mentioned and showed their unbelievable pools, can afford to split the money between all 18 participating teams. Some events can provide only three first teams with the prize; in this case, the pool can be divided into three parts: 50 percent to the winners, 30 percent to the second team, and 20% for the third one. However, in this case, organizers risk the KPI of the event, as many groups might refuse to participate in a contest that is not 100% profitable.

How much money is paid to each team?

Let’s consider an example: The International 2019. OG, the ultimate winners, got 45,5% of the whole prize cash, which made a total of $15,573,397. Team Liquid, who took second place, received 13%: $1,449,542; the third-place team, the PSG LGD, left with 9% of the fund and gained $3,080,453. The other teams were awarded 6%-0,25% of the prize pool, which equaled $2,053,634 – $85,568.

However, this is a massive prize pool for cybersports. Thus teams who are not into Dota 2 International have estimated earnings of about $1,000—$5o0,000.

Top earners in cybersport

Let’s see who gets the most significant esports earnings. Again, such top starts are just a minority among all professional gamers. Still, they prove that esports players are not just wasting time behind their PCs but do serious business with enormous rewards.

Johan ‘N0tail’ Sundstein

One of the top earners is Johan Sundstein from Denmark, specializing in Dota 2. OG’s team became the winners on The International twice: in 2018 and 2019. He gained much from the tournaments, but the Valve prizes do not limit his income. Analysts estimated his earnings for 2020 at $6,886,181 compared to the annual salary of Manchester United players in the same year.

Being a co-founder and captain of OG, he also makes money on Twitch streams and sponsorship deals with Red Bull, BMW, and others.

Jesse “JerAx” Vainikka

Finnish Dota-2 professional player Jesse Vainikka won only several tournaments within his career, but it still made him one of the highest-paid professional gamers worldwide. He played for various teams, including OG and Team Liquid, and his total profit from cybersport is about $6,700,000. Half of this amount was gained within a year in 2019 when his real wages reached $3,163,536.

Topias “Topson” Taavitsainen

Tobias is another top-earning esports player from Finland; he is one of the wealthiest professional games and famous for having won The International two times in a row. He started playing Dota when he was eight and is currently a part of the OG team. His total career earnings are $5,414,446.

Top-paid esports disciplines

What is the game that can bring players an immense income? Some games appeared and vanished immensely from the eSports arenas, but there are also very young products that are here to stay and attract large money sums.

Dota 2

You could have already guessed that Dota 2 is the wealthiest discipline with the richest esports tournaments. Their first The International was held in 2011, and since then, there is still no game that could ever beat the records in terms of esports winnings offered at a championship. Moreover, the prize pool becomes even more extensive with years. Within nine years of existence, Valve has given $140,000,000 for winnings in Dota 2 events.

Dota 2 is also a good area for streamers: Dota 2 streams gather about 1,000,000-2,000,000 viewers for one event, which means generous compensations from the sponsorships and donations.

CS: GO

The second most paid e-gaming discipline is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. There is some evident competition between Dota and CS: GO in terms of professional gaming: Counter-Strike is striving to obtain a broader interest in the games and enlarge their prize money amounts using all possible sources, but it remains only the second most rewarding game. However, streaming the gaming process of CS: GO can bring plenty of money: the number of viewers can reach 300,000 people at once; there are about 1,000,000 viewers on average monthly.

Fortnite

Fortnite was released in 2017 and instantly gained high popularity among casual and professional players and viewers, and gaming experts. Only a year after a release, almost 80,000,000 people participated in gaming. The first and the only Fortnite World Cup had a prize pool of $100,000,000. The winner, a 16-year old Bugha, won $3,000,000. The number of Fortnite streams’ views are also impressive: about 900,000 members on average per month.

League of Legends

The League of Legends tournaments are organized and controlled by the developer’s company Riot Games,and their Championship prize money amount is about $5,000,000. The game’s audience is approximately 100,000,000, and it gathers about 170,000 views in a month.

Overwatch

Blizzard, the Overwatch and Overwatch league owner in esports, invests a lot into their esports teams. During the last few years, Blizzard’s development company works on creating a professional league in this discipline and provides large sums of up to $5,000,000 to host competitions.

An average of 20,000 viewers monthly watches overwatch events only on Twitch.

Other ways to earn in esports

Many pro-gamers finish their career as active cyber athletes quite early, after 30 years old. It is mainly connected with the fact that younger people and kids have a faster reaction, which determines the success of esports players. However, ex-gamers usually remain in the esports industry and work as analysts, commentators, and coaches.

A shoutcaster’s earnings do not depend on the team’s performance, but they can still gain significant income if they work hard and are qualified to participate in the top events, like The International. For instance, working at the TI, a top English-speaking shout caster can receive up to $40,000 in two weeks; the lowest salary is $3,000.

Esports coaching

Like in any elite sport, ex-active players become a part of management operations or start their careers as coaches. It is not that hard to get such a position if you have enough experience in different esports tournaments. More and more esports academies keep opening worldwide and look for professional employees who can help young athletes with their career paths. It is pretty hard work, though, as it includes various activities involving offline training aimed at developing fast-reacting speed, attentiveness, and fine motor skills. Thus, how much can a coach earn?

Coaching salaries in esports

Let’s turn to figures that ZipRectuiter gives us in their official records. According to them, an average annual salary for esports coaching is $62,000 per year, or about $30 per hour and about $5,000 per month. However, the pay range can vary a lot: from $22,000 to $76,000. Some examples show the earnings can be even higher.

For instance, Brazilian CS’s salary: GO professional, former active player Wilton “zews” Prado earns $120,000 per year at the position of a coach for Evil Geniuses. Another example is a vacation that The Team Liquid, Dota 2, LOL, and Starcraft-2 professionals, published several years ago. They seemed a coach for the office full-time job and offered up to $55,000 annually. Since that, salaries in esports teams became almost 300% higher, so we can imagine how much can a current head coach of Team Liquid earn.

How much can you earn at gaming streams?

Most players spend a lot of time streaming their gaming process when they are not busy preparing or participating in tournaments. This adds a lot to their overall esports revenues as streams boost their brand awareness and are monetized differently.

The easiest way to get money from a stream is to enable ads that viewers see right in the middle of broadcasting. A company that wants to promote their product with a streamer’s help signs a contract with a player; both sides agree on how many ads a streamer has to show in an hour or per the whole stream. Not every player can add advertising videos in their streams: streaming platforms enable this function for streamers with a certain number of subscribers and views. The payout depends on the number of views; a standard rate is $1-$5 per 1,000 views.

Another option is to turn on the paid subscription and offer premium subscribers extra bonuses like unique emoticons for a chat or ads-free mode. Each premium member’s price varies from $5 to $25, and a streamer pays 50% to the platform. The conditions can differ for various streaming services, but they are like that on average.

Native advertising, when a streamer mentions or uses a particular brand during the game (for example, drinks soda of one specific brand or wears a T-shirt with a logo), can also bring decent income — depending on a contract.

Finally, streamers get donations from their fans. There are no limits on contributions as it all depends on fans’ generosity. Some players can boast unbelievable amounts of thousands of dollars donated during a streaming show.

Final words

The average age of esports players is 18-25 years, so if you decide on making a carer in gaming, you will most likely stop to think about your future. Suppose you are lucky, talented, and hard-working enough to achieve state-of-the-art results. In this case, you can play for 3-5 years to gain an amount that can cover the expenses for many years to come.

Besides, after the contract with a particular team is over, most pro-gaming specialists continue the career path in the same esports market. Unless anything happens with Youtube or Twitch, they will be guaranteed to have money from the streaming business. Analytics and advertising positions are also eagerly sought in the industry, though it is not paid as fine as gaming duties.