Countries & Video Games
A few weeks ago I joined a Discord call and saw a few friends watching the League of Legends 2024 World Championship. This is a game that I've never played nor really had an interest in watching, but I saw 2.5~ million other people watching the stream.
As the teams were introduced, I couldn't help but notice the rosters were unified between Korea (T1) and China (Bilibili Gaming) and it was always so interesting to me to see what country represented the best players of any game.
So I decided to do some research between a few categories to see what countries tend to produce the best gamer of said game. I wanted to look at games that bring in the most money (top 5) and games I play (random 5) and see what countries hold the highest winning player.
Top Prize Money Games
- Dota 2 - 362~ million
- Fortnite - 191~ million
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - 162~ million
- League of Legends - 115~ million
- Arena of Valor - 98~ million
Right out of the gate - I've only played one of these games (Fortnite) so perhaps I'm not as much as a gamer as I thought.
Before I jump into the details of all the games, I want to list my own games I play or played.
Top Money for Games I Play
- Fortnite - 191~ million
- Overwatch - 35~ million
- Halo 5 - 7.1~ million
- Halo Infinite - 7~ million
- Age of Empires 2 - 3.9~ million
- Gears of War 4 - 3.1~ million
- Halo 3 - 2.3~ million
- Halo 2 - 1.6~ million
So you could sum all the games I play winnings and they don't even come near Dota 2's prize pool. So I'll go through each of these games and look at the top 3 players to see how the countries break down.
Dota 2
- N0tail - Denmark - 7~ million
- JerAx - Finland - 6.4~ million
- ana - Australia - 6~ million
Now unfortunately I don't know anything about Dota 2, but seeing the top 3 players in different countries helps destroy my idea that certain countries are better at certain games. I thought about summing all the winnings of all players then group by country, but its a bit unfair when countries like China and Russia have over 600 players and other countries barely pass 200.
I then thought I would just average the winnings to get a winnings per country per game, but countries with so little players but high winnings absolutely destroy that comparison. I then saw some players with a huge amount of wins, but no money. It just seems year after year prize pools grew - so I'd need to account for that.
After all that thinking though - I just want to see which countries correspond to which game, so lets just go back to looking at top 3.
Fortnite
- Bugha - United States - 3.7~ million
- Aqua - Austria - 2.2~ million
- psalm - United States - 1.8~ million
Fortnite had 2 Americans in the top 3, with an interesting backstory. For both Bugha and psalm they struck gold with their placings in the Fortnite World Cup Solo Finals 2019. This was a tournament that is still placed at #1 in terms of the largest prize pool. Especially since it was a solo tournament all the funds were reserved for the winner. This is where Bugha scored a 3 million dollar single tournament win.
Outside of that it seems there is a healthy mix of countries in the top 20. I attribute this to the quick rise of Fortnite and serious money that was being offered at tournaments. This of course attracted players from everywhere to compete.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- dupreeh - Denmark - 2.1~ million
- Xyp9x - Denmark - 2~ million
- dev1ce - Denmark - 1.9~ million
Finally just what I wanted to investigate. We have the top 5 players all being from Denmark, so why did Denmark get so good at Counter-Strike? It may be because Denmark supports gamers and treats it like any other sport. They have trainings, integration with school and pro teams centralized right there in Denmark. A few of the top pro teams in Counter Strike are based right there in Denmark, which may play into things as well. However, that could be true for any game or country so perhaps it remains a mystery.
League of Legends
- Faker - Republic of Korea - 1.8~ million
- Duke - Republic of Korea - 1~ million
- Bang - Republic of Korea - 1~ million
Another very interesting bit of research. While the top 3 are all Republic of Korea (South Korea) - we have South Korea & China holding nearly all in the top 50. I wondered why this was, but it seems in my brief research its all about popularity. The server population of Korean servers is nearly double of all of United States, but I think its mainly about support.
League of Legends is huge and the community and companies support it locally when compared to other games. When you compare/contrast with games in the states - its like every other month we hear of a gaming organization or sponsor leaving.
Arena of Valor
- HuHai - China - 1.8~ million
- Fly - China - 1.7~ million
- 1dao - China - 1.5~ million
I've never heard of this game in my life until this blog post and its insane. The top 57 people are all from China, its not till the 58th person do you have another country (Thailand) represented. It seems this game was built by TiMi Studio Group, which is a subsidiary of Tencent Games. Tencent keeps attempting to go global, but just doesn't have much success in my personal opinion.
Overwatch
- Striker - Republic of Korea - $500k~
- smurf - Republic of Korea - $400k~
- Fleta - Republic of Korea - $400k~
Another game that is primarily dominated by Republic of Korea (South Korea), but the winnings are so normalized between all the parties. I know from playing and watching this live that Overwatch started The Overwatch League that had organizations with salaries and players. So as teams won events the winnings went back to the organization that probably issued bonuses, but it otherwise kept the salaries rolling.
With a business model so different than other leagues - it was bound to fail and sure enough a few later - it did.
Halo Infinite, Halo 5, Halo 3 and Halo 2
- SnakeBite - United States - 1~ million
- Royal2 - Canada - 950k~
- Frosty - United States - 900k~
Now I combined all the Halo's here because some of these folks played between games. What I found so interesting is that Ogre 2 who I thought would be pretty high up there, was at 17th place with 250k~. I guess winning a ton of tournaments during the rise of e-sports didn't net much money.
It just shows that prize pools kept growing year after year and if you look at the top 20 of these players its mainly United States, with exception of 1 Canada and 1 France contender. I have no idea why Halo was never competitive in more countries, but I'm guessing it was because of Halo's slow movement into the PC realm.
Age of Empires 2
- TheViper - Norway - 350k~
- Hera - Canada - 300k~
- Liereyy - Austria - 230k~
Another game that has an insane amount of different countries present in the top 20. Age of Empires has been around for over 20 years and with such a worldwide historic game - it stands to reason that you'd have a worldwide player base.
While the monetary gains don't compare to some of the more popular titles - its clear that any country can represent a top competitor. When you look at the top 15 - its a different country represented on each place until you hit that 15th place.
I don't think I can draw any conclusion from any of this data. With any pattern its broken with another game. I did learn that some games draw some serious money in compared to others, but that correlates pretty well with the popularity of said game.