NBA teams have made the most dramatic moves this decade. Immortals own both OpTic Gaming and MiBR. In 2017, there were 74 deals (the majority from angel and venture capital investors) worth $1.52 billion involving esports companies, according to PitchBook, up from six deals worth $34. 1. It would make more sense just to pay the $46 (statistically) Edit: Although, this doesn't account for the worth of the other guns you get that aren't USP. Organizations like FaZe Clan and NRG are focusing on content, with original shows in addition to their armies of streamers, while 100 Thieves is building a lifestyle company around its apparel. If it were negotiating terms now, it would likely fetch an even higher price. 1. A mere $92M. But fundamentally I believe some will become great and sustainable businesses.. Titles include Age of Empires II, Apex Legends, and Fortnite. The modern battlefield in gaming is for larger social media and YouTube talent, says John Robinson, COO of 100 Thieves, a Los Angeles-based game outfit that owns franchise teams competing in League of Legends and Call of Duty. Cloud9 topped the first two editions of the Forbes ranking, in 2018 and 2019, and has historically been the dominant pure-play esports brand. Fnatic also qualified for both Dota Majors this year and Dota's season-ending championship: The International 2022. This organizations prize pool money is directly tied to the Dota 2 scene and hopes to see, along with many other organizations, Valve revive the scene in 2021. He recorded career highs of 15.4 points a game and 2.2 steals a game (fifth in the league) and made 101 three-point field goals in the 1996-97 season . This is in stark contrast to the $753K the organization took home in 2019, and the $524K in 2018. also made up a large portion of the organizations 2020 winnings, with Fnatic taking home $214K, with $101K of that coming from its 5th-8th finish at the World Championships. Many of the top eSports players are celebrities to Millennial and Generation Y fans. Top 100 Highest Overall Earnings - Esports Player Rankings :: Esports Earnings Player Rankings Highest Overall Earnings Highest Single Game Earnings Highest Earnings By Country Highest Earnings By Age Most Tournament Results Last 30 Days Last 90 Days Last 365 Days Female Players Console Players Fighting Game Players Each player independently controls a powerful character, their "hero, who has a unique ability and a differing style of play. Alongside Fortnite and PLAYERUNKNOWNS BATTLEGROUNDS, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive accounts for over 60% of its earnings. And for Team Secret, Dota 2 is a staple. In an even more distant future, the establishment of a metaverse linking multiple popular games together could steal some power from publishers, allowing teams to sell items or avatars that could transfer from game to game and mitigating the IP issues they are currently navigating. Evil Geniuses, aka EG, are a predominantly North American eSports organization, based in San Francisco. We have accumulated data from a few dependable sources, for example, Forbes and ESports Earnings to decide the total assets of the most extravagant Esports players living in the world. Those results are pending. 2 company, 100 Thieves, which counts Drake, music mogul Scooter Braun and billionaire Dan Gilbert among its owners, has soared 142%, to $460 million. The first step is signing partnerships with cryptocurrency platforms like FTX and Crypto.com, as TSM and Fnatic have done, but the real payoffs could come later. With revenue expected to fall to $8.5 million this year, the teams value isless than half the $260 million Forbes estimated in 2019. eSports teams tend to have similar components. In 2016, he also became the vice-chairman and partner of the Oilers Entertainment Group . Since then, this team has gone on to expand its gaming roster. Of all the biggest eSports organizations, SoloMid and Cloud9 are the most valuable. Fnatic is London-based, although many of its best players are Swedish. 6 this year. he nascent esports industry resembles the Wild West. NRG Esports already owned the San Francisco Shock OWL team, but its their acquisition of former OpTic Gaming chief Hector H3CZ Rodriguez that really turned heads among the gaming community. . Their League of Legends team won the first League of Legends World Championship in 2011. . Here are some of the richest professional gamers in the world. Sponsorships help too. Red Bull G2 has teams competing in. That bravado has been tamed. Lukas Scherbaum Gaming - 10. LGD Gaming 15. Huge prize pools in this industry are common. Who is the highest-paid esports player of all time? 14 Leading eSports Agencies for Influencer Marketing Managers to K 18 Talent Management Agencies for eSports, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - $1,024,251.21, Magomed Khalilov (Collapse) - $3,973,920.01, Yaroslav Naidenov (Miposhka) - $3,973,920.01, Alexander Khertek (TORONTOTOKYO) - $3,973,920.01, How to Become an Amazon Influencer a Step-by-Step Guide, RFP Management Software for Growth-Focused Companies. There are also ideas emerging around so-called play-to-earn games, which reward users with NFTs or cryptocoins. Natus Vincere 7. Team Secret, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, was able to put together a great year as far as Dota 2 was concerned taking home $1.017M playing in 12 events that survived the pandemic. Sponsorship is the biggest revenue stream ($359 million this year), followed by advertising ($174 million), media rights ($161 million), game publishing fees ($116 million) and merchandise and tickets ($96 million). T1 - $150 million Record world champion in LoL and with Faker they got a legendary esports player in their squad. Paid subscriptions are also a great way for streamers to bring in revenue. Their breakthrough came in the Frankfurt Major 2015, where they defeated Evil Geniuses, CDEC Gaming, and Team Secret. The deal also saw them snap up OpTics LCS spot, which will be rebranded to Immortals, and operate the Los Angeles Valiant OWL team and the MiBR CS:GO squad. General partners include Nike, Red Bull, HyperX. Founded in 2010, this team has exploded from a group of teens with video cams and a love for video gaming and into a multinational army of gamers. That is why eSports players stream as well. Coca-Cola 7. League did everything they could to be successful in 2020. Rodriguez has been able to weather the pandemic and dwindling esports prize pools by fielding multiple teams, with some not requiring a lot of overhead expenses. In 2021, the total market value of the eSports industry hit the. eSport Roster Positions Roster Titles; League of Legends: 5: . The other focus for the company, which has offices in Seoul, Shanghai and Santa Monica, California, is its coaching platform, which launched last year and has already enrolled thousands of students in Asia, Gen.G says. Team Liquid became part of the entertainment and sports management company, aXiomatic, in 2016. On June 10, 2021, FaZe Clan became the first esports team to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. In December 2020, FaZe Clan was worth $305 million. FaZe Clan is trying to go public through a SPAC merger; the other nine companies in this years ranking remain privately owned. On the last edition of this list, in 2020, Enthusiast ranked No. Take a look at the diversified winnings with Team Liquids Dota 2 squad taking home $414K, CS:GO $292K, Starcraft II $95K, Player Unknowns Battlegrounds $83K, League of Legends $81K, Hearthstone $75K, Fortnite $64K, and Arena FPS coming in at $49K. They also have teams playing other games, including League of Legends, StarCraft II, WarCraft III, FIFA, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The club was founded in 2015, in Moscow, Russia. This represents a 70% growth in the next four years. While the team made most of its money from Dota 2, Brawl Star, and Rocket League, it also dabbles in League of Legends and has a strong affinity for FIFA 17, 18, and 19. Reach Mike Ozanian at mozanian@forbes.com. Monetization remains the principal challenge for literally every esports team, says Bobby Sharma, a private equity investor and the managing partner at advisory firm Electronic Sports Group. The teams base is in Hangzhou, China. Dan Gilbert, who founded Quicken Loans and owns the NBAs Cleveland Cavaliers, invested in 100 Thieves after it got its League of Legends team last year. Riot Games began selling franchises for $10 million a pop for its game League of Legends in the summer of 2017. That recognition has sent teams scrambling to expand to broader gaming culture and beyond, treating esports more like a customer acquisition funnel as they seek to justify their lofty valuations and continue to scale. Iconic sports namesfrom the New York Yankees and Houston Rockets to Robert Kraft and Magic Johnsonhave bought in. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. Facilities are being built where gamers can train. Coming in at No. A chunk of that will go toward building a 20,000-to-30,000-square-foot training facility and home base for its operations in Los Angeles, scheduled to open in 2019. The team makes an estimated $9 million per year and is valued at $185 million. In 2021, global esports revenues are expected to reach $1,084 million, representing a year-on-year growth of 14.5%. But it, too, is diversifying, looking to bolster its entertainment business and the esports academy it launched last year. A report last month by gaming data firm Newzoo found that the global esports audience was on track to reach 532 million this year, including 261 million esports enthusiasts who watch esports content more than once a month. Since the pick up, NRG have locked down the Chicago Call of Duty spot, and continue to operate in many of the world's biggest esports, such as Fortnite, Smash, Apex Legends, and more, valued at. Aster match roster is . Dota2, in particular, appears to be where most of the money is nowadays.Cumulative prizes for Dota 2 nearly reached $50 million in 2021. SynerGE (PUBG Mobile) SynerGE is a mobile gaming team where the owner for the team is Sameer Peerjade and the CEO of the team is Dr. Rushindra Sinha, Mohit Israney, Yash Manoj Singh. Fnatic (Valued $175 million)6. Teams not only have to pick the right games to compete in but also have to hope those titles stay relevant. Team Liquid. Team Liquid belongs on any list featuring the biggest or best esports organizations. It covers games ranging from Super Smash Bros to Hearthstone and Vainglory, and their management team is bigger than many teams' entire roster. Fnatic 8. Cloud 9 sit top of the tree with an estimated value of $400 million, and $29 million in revenue. This organizations prize pool money is directly tied to the. 2 company, 100 Thieves, which counts Drake, music mogul Scooter Braun and billionaire Dan Gilbert among its. gfinity.net. Esports revenue makes up only 6% of revenue. The worry now is that esports companies might be swept up into a metaverse bubble. By Forbes calculations, excluding ad share revenue paid to talenta figure excluded from revenue estimates reported by other companies on the listEnthusiast Gaming is worth 5.5 times revenue. Here are the top 10 teams in terms of prize money won for 2020. All Rights Reserved. Lee Aik Soon/Riot Games Inc. via Getty Images, TSM has the richest sponsorship deal in esports, a ten-year, $210 million naming rights agreement with crypto exchange FTX, but its real selling point is its tech businesses: Blitz, an app that trains users in popular video games, and Dyno, which offers a moderation bot for Discord servers. Giant companies and wealthy individuals alike have invested in esports, from organizations and teams to tournaments and events. The company,. When FaZe Clan, the esports and entertainment company with a rock-star image and a cavalcade of celebrity partners, revealed in October that it planned to go public through a SPAC merger, the announcement came with a bold claim: that FaZe was already worth $650 million and would reach $1 billion with the money it raised in the deal. * Data compiled using information from EsportsEarnings.com. Its a page borrowed from FaZe Clans playbook. Valued at $190 million, 100 Thieves jumps to the fifth spot on our list, from No. Enthusiast Gaming is ranked for the first time. That was two months after the company made its first acquisition, buying gaming keyboard brand Higround. Team Liquid, owned by aXiomatic Gaming, is the third-most valuable esports company at $440 million. That stratospheric valuationcomparable to MLBs Miami Marlins or the NHLs Detroit Red Wingsblew past the $305 million that Forbes had estimated FaZe Clan was worth just ten months earlier. Last month, the company opened the Castle, a funhouse, gamers version of a fraternity house and production studio to churn out digital content that can be sold to sponsors. Who is the richest esports player? He is also the highest paid eSports player that doesn't play Dota 2, however, he is ranked 41st in overall earnings. Top 20 Richest Esports Players. Team Secret, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, was able to put together a great year as far as. Big companies approach teams with bids and contracts when they gain notoriety for their skills and a considerable fan base. And Scooter Braun, manager of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, recently co-led a Series A round, bringing total funding to $25 million. Traffic cop at the intersection of money and sports. Regarded by many as a team synonymous with League of Legends, TSM also boast a mindblowing $400 million valuation, and it comes as no surprise that they operate one of the 12 LCS teams in North America.