TI is a bit notorious because it's prize pool is massive compared to other esports. Winning TI puts someone's prize earnings past lifetime earnings of most other top player's career prize earnings in other games
This is only prize earnings, important to keep in mind that Dota heavily weights prizes from tournaments. Highest total prize earnings on that chart is $7M, Faker pulls in $5M/year in salary alone.
Fascinating. This isn't a space I follow, but the data is eye-opening. To contextualize it for myself a bit more, I checked out annual earnings [1] instead of lifetime and compared it to the overall global list [2] of athletes across all sports.
One interesting takeaway is that it looks like eSports are still a couple orders of magnitude away from breaking into that rarefied air — the top eSports athletes earned ~$1.8M over the last year, while the cutoff to make it in the list of top 50 global highest-earning athletes is ~$45M. It wouldn't surprise me to see eSports start making it up there over the next couple decades, though.
The second interesting takeaway is that, for many athletes in the global top 50, their off-the-field earnings are a big part of their total. By contrast, endorsement deals for eSports athletes don't seem like much of a thing nowadays, other than the occasional team-up for a gaming mouse/keyboard. This seems like it'd be a growth area for eSports over the next couple decades, too.
TL;DR: I wish there were some way to buy some ETFs or stake some athletes in the eSports space. It seems like it has a lot of growth ahead of it still.
21 dota players at the top before you get a different game (Fortnite)