Top 5 Great eSports Games
eSports have been around in gaming for longer than you might imagine. The first recorded video game competition took place way back in 1972 at Stanford University using the game “Spacewar”. One thing that has changed a lot over the years in the prize money. For that early competition, the prize was a year’s subscription to “Rolling Stone” magazine. These days, prize money for competitive gamine can run into millions of dollars, and even has its own eSports betting industry. If you fancy giving some of the most popular eSport games a try, many of them are free to play so worth checking out.
The term “best” or “biggest” eSports game is hard to define, as it can be measured in so many different ways – How many pro-players, the amount of prize money, online viewing figures for matches, etc… Because of this, the list below features 5 of the top eSport games, but in no particular order.
Dota 2
Dota 2 is a multiplayer online battle arena, from Valve, the people behind Steam. This sequel to Defense of the Ancients (DotA) is played by millions of people worldwide who enter battle as one of over a hundred heroes. The gameplay consists of two teams of five players compete to collectively destroy a large structure defended by the opposing team known as the “Ancient”, whilst also defending their own. If you’re worried about being crushed when you first dive in, you can learn the ropes by playing in a co-op vs. bots mode until you feel ready to take on some actual human opponents.
In 2020, Dota 2 had a whopping $35 million in prize money and a peak viewership of just over 1 million. The game has around 3,800 registered pro players.
League Of Legends
In terms of popularity, League of Legends is, by quite a large margin, the biggest game in eSport. Developed by Riot Games in 2009, the team-based strategy game sets two teams of five powerful champions to face off and destroy the other’s base. You can choose from over 140 champions to make epic plays, secure kills, and takedown towers as you battle your way to victory.
League is the most played PC game in the world and generates billions of hours of gameplay per year. It is also the largest esport on the planet, with the 2020 League of Legends World Championship Finals generating a record-breaking 23.04 million average minute audience. The one place it does fall a little behind is in the prize money, which was $9 million in 2020. The game has around 7,000 pro players.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (or CS: GO as it is often known) is a multiplayer first-person shooter developed again by Valve, alongside Hidden Path Entertainment, released in 2012. The game, again, pits two teams against each other, in this case, Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists, with a variety of different objective-based game modes. These include the classic “Competitive” mode, a 2v2 “Wingman” mode, a “Casual” drop-in mode, “Arms Race” which spawns a multitude of weapons, the “Flying Scoutsman” 8v8 casual mode, and the hugely popular “Demolition” mode, where players take turns attacking and defending a single bombsite in a series of maps.
In 2020, CS: GO gave out $20 million in prizes with a peak viewership of 1.2 million. The game has just over 13,000 pro players.
Fortnite
Fortnite is a free-to-play Battle Royale game, released in 2017 by Epic Games. There are actually three game modes – the PvE ‘Save the World’ setting, a creative sandbox mode, and the main PvP Battle Royale. It is that last mode which allows up to 100 players to either play solo or in groups to fight their way around the map until they are the only player (or group) left standing. Players arrive on the map by being airdropped from a “Battle Bus” without weapons. They then have to scavenge up supplies and weapons in order to stay alive. What makes things even trickier is that the map is surrounded by a toxic storm that shrinks as the match progresses, pushing players into a tighter area of play.
There are around 4,300 professional players for Fortnite, with the total prizes handed out in 2020 coming in at around $7 million, and a peak viewership of around 2.3 million.
Overwatch
Released in 2016 from Blizzard, the people behind the monolithic World Of Warcraft, Overwatch is a team-based first-person shooter set on a near-future earth. Teams battle in 6v6 combat choosing from a range of heroes, each with unique power sets that tend to fit into the standard archetypes of tank, damage or healer. There are various game modes, allowing training, casual, and ranked competitive play, so you can spend some time trying out tactics against the AI before you take on actual real-life people.
Overwatch handed out around $5 million in prizes through 2020, and had an average viewership of just over 1 million. There are around 3,500 professional players.
