Most popular Esports video games 1992 – 2020 HD racing bar
No. 5 – Call of Duty: $6.27M
With the debut of the newly geo-located and franchised Call of Duty League in 2020, the game largely held its own in this year’s ranking as compared to last, with a jump of three slots and only a slight downtick in prize payout. Unlike the Overwatch League, the Call of Duty League committed early on to retaining a tournament-style structure similar to its pre-franchise model.
This meant that each week of competition needed to pay out its own prize pool in addition to the $4.6M Activision Blizzard doled out for the inaugural CDL championship. In another break from the OWL, Activision Blizzard also committed significant resources to an open semi-pro ecosystem for Call of Duty to run parallel to the CDL. The largest of these tournaments paid out $250K.
No. 4 – Fortnite: $7.87M
Epic Games’ popular battle royale title dropped from last year’s top slot to No. 4 this year in large part because it had no Fortnite World Cup in 2020 due to the pandemic. The event in 2019 gained, well, epic media attention after giving $3 million to then 16-year-old winner Kyle “Bugha” Giersdorf.
But Epic has always had what’s perceived in the industry to be a finnicky relationship with esports, and now the company is continuing to back off of its previously dominating position. Epic has already announced there will be no offline tournaments for Fortnite in 2021, meaning no World Cup once again. While the publisher has the resources to boost Fortnite back to the top at any point, without a significant reinvestment in 2022 the game is likely to continue falling down and out of esports relevancy.
No. 3 – League of Legends: $8.00M
The world’s most popular esport by viewership metrics was able to largely persevere through the pandemic – albeit through mostly online-only matches – and League of Legends thus jumped from No. 6 last year to the third slot this year because it didn’t see a major drop-off in prize money. After paying out $9M last year, League only saw a slight drop to $8M this year.
League of Legends is one of the few esports where, despite the large totals distributed, prize money generally takes a back seat to the prestige of competition. Gone are the days of the most important trophy awarded at an event being the novelty giant check worth thousands. Instead, the highly coveted Summoner’s Cup trophy takes center stage at the World Championship while its recipients quietly rake in over $100K each after the confetti has finished falling.
No. 2 – Dota 2: $8.87M
With the pandemic forcing the delay of this year’s The International, Dota 2 saw a massive drop-off from last year as expected. After doling out a massive haul last year that nearly reached $50M, this year came in at a relatively paltry $8.87M.
2020 revealed just how reliant Dota’s esports relevancy is without that record-breaking TI prize pool each year. Without significant community pressure and third party organizers stepping up, Dota would have fallen much further down the list.
The big question facing this title in 2021 is what will happen to that over-large championship purse. Valve still raised over $40M for the 2020 TI before postponing to August 2021 and has not stated what will happen with that money. There could be a scenario where that money gets rolled into next year’s crowdfunding effort and we see a single-event prize pool surpass $80M.
No. 1 – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: $14.75M
The longtime OG of FPS games takes the top slot this year despite having a dropoff in prize money from 2019. CS:GO’s open, third-party-fueled ecosystem was arguably best suited to adapting to the online-only, fractured nature of 2020 esports competition. There was no league infrastructure to wrangle into place outside of the newly-launched Flashpoint, which did not have the OWL’s challenges of trying to navigate a league with teams operating across four continents.
CS:GO tournament organizers quickly shifted their events to a regional competition system and continued pumping out content all year long. The only thing missing for the game’s ecosystem were the million-dollar payouts from Valve’s Major system, which will no doubt return the moment live events can safely resume.
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