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Event Prize Distribution
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/T8NAc.png)
Small Events
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/VTnRY.png)
What you see above is a presentation of data that has been collected and presented by the awesome Liquipedia volunteers. The charts show the distribution and trends in award money since launch. A gut check against the gold standard of SC2 prize winnings, sc2earnings.com shows that players with over $1,000 in winnings have combined for about 80% of all winnings. Seeing as premier events account for approximately 75% of all prize money, I feel pretty good about the data.
I think that the data show some interesting things for the Starcraft scene.
First is that prize money is still growing, if at a bit of an uneven pace.
Second is that there are seven organizations that are really providing a lot of the financial incentive for players. It is no coincidence in my view that GOM is awarding the most money and that most of the best players either live in Korea or try to go there to train.
The last bit of info that stuck in my mind was that small events account for almost 25% of all winnings. It takes a whole lot of dailies to award the same amount of money as even one season of the GSL.
Edit: Update to show NASL and ESL correctly in Organization chart.
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Cool stuff, I hope this does something to reduce the amount of "esports bubble" and other such negative posts I've been seeing recently. It looks like stead growth to me, instead of something unsustainable.
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Thanks so much for putting all of this information in one place. This is awesome :D
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Very nice thank you. Once again as everyone has already stated, it's incredible how little MLG had to invest last year compared to what they got and their rivals.
edit: It would be interesting if we could add estimated invite cost to MLG. (but then IPL gets some +s too I believe)
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thx so much for this very good look at prize money
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Oh there are graphs with colors and shit all up in this humpty dumpty.
Thank you for this information.
"It is no coincidence in my view that GOM is awarding the most money and that most of the best players either live in Korea or try to go there to train."
- I kind of disagree with this thought however. Certainly it's an incentive, and definitely also a benefit, but the best players are in Korea regardless of the money being there because the best players are the Koreans, simply because of everything about how they live and practice.
If the money weren't there, it would still be the case.
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This is a fantastic compilation! Thanks so much for this 
I'm sure we'll continue to see an increase in prize money over the next year, although I'm curious as to how MLG's new format may affect it.
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On January 29 2012 10:46 Angel_ wrote:
"It is no coincidence in my view that GOM is awarding the most money and that most of the best players either live in Korea or try to go there to train."
- I kind of disagree with this thought however. Certainly it's an incentive, and definitely also a benefit, but the best players are in Korea regardless of the money being there because the best players are the Koreans, simply because of everything about how they live and practice.
If the money weren't there, it would still be the case.
I think that GOM can award that kind of money because the people and players there are so in to the game (maybe just gaming in general). I think that you're right that the players didn't all decide to move there because of prize money, but that they were already there. I think that in this case at least, the money followed the interest!
Edit:Misquote!
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Amazing post Thanks a lot. Didn't knew ESL gave the same amount of prize money as MLG, sick.
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What period is the moving average line in the monthly prize money graph based on?
Also nice work. I had calculated a rough low end estimate of prize money a bit ago and came out with $3m+, nice to have a more comprehensive total rather than the crap in the advertising thread by some site talking about top e-Sports by prize money.
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On January 29 2012 10:55 MrCon wrote:Amazing post Thanks a lot. Didn't knew ESL gave the same amount of prize money as MLG, sick.
$242,000 to $172,000? Hardly the same...
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I feel that there really needs to be more small events and playhem/go4sc2 style dailies. They're a really nice way of granting smaller players some reasonably serious BoX experience. ...granted they get past the horrible Bo1 segments.
That, and they can provide some good content during quiet areas of the season. Did anyone see atnCloud vs FXOLucky?
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Is this really accurate? if so. Nice job
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This is awesome. Thanks for doing this, and making it so visually easy to understand.
This would be a great way to show people new to competitive SC2 how Sc2 is growing as a competitive Esport.
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On January 29 2012 10:59 Lonyo wrote:
What period is the moving average line in the monthly prize money graph based on?
That is a second order polynomial over all of the monthly data.
I struggled a bit with how to show that, but I feel that it fits the best given the seasonal nature of many of the premier events. I also didn't want a the December lull in a few of the big events to misrepresent the overall trend (this is especially considering that I used the start date, not the end date or when most of the games were played for logging tournament dates).
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On January 29 2012 11:02 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On January 29 2012 10:55 MrCon wrote:Amazing post Thanks a lot. Didn't knew ESL gave the same amount of prize money as MLG, sick. $242,000 to $172,000? Hardly the same...
Yeah the font is too small on my monitor and I read 272.000$.
And I also read ESV and not ESL, that's why I thought it was sick.
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This is awesome, thanks for putting in the hard work to gather all this data into some pretty informative charts. It kinda makes me excited to see what the prize pools will look like a year from now.
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jesus christ! that is a lot of money. awesome to look at; thanks for putting together.
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You missed NASL Season 1 in July O_O ... also NASL has awarded >$200,000 in prizes , not sure why it's not listed there pretty much anywhere ...
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Second is that there are six organizations that are really providing a lot of the financial incentive for players. It is no coincidence in my view that GOM is awarding the most money and that most of the best players either live in Korea or try to go there to train.
The last bit of info that stuck in my mind was that small events account for almost 25% of all winnings. It takes a whole lot of dailies to award the same amount of money as even one season of the GSL.
2. Also demands the most amount of cost/expenses, no? If not, the competition is higher and so the work or effort is a lot harder/demands more from the person.
3. Skill ceiling is lower and most of the tournaments can be done in the entirety of the day.
The big winners are the smallest slices because they offer the most with the least amount of time (3-4 days of competition). The demand of skill or experience however is up for debate.
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I didn't differentiate finals events from the leagues (just trying to log awards once!), maybe I can clear up the difference in the future!
I have the league start in April in my backup, that is what the Liquipedia is showing... did I misremember when it started?
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You have ESL listed in the top right graph twice, once as a major tournament, then again in the asterisk.
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On January 29 2012 13:03 Dexington wrote:
You have ESL listed in the top right graph twice, once as a major tournament, then again in the asterisk.
Good eye, sir. I had originally not included it, and then decided to update the number of major organizations to show. Xeris, this is also where NASL got dropped... my bad! Revise! Revise!
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This is very impressive work. Team Liquid is definitely the best source for SC2 tournaments. It's incredible that you put all this together very nice.
My favourite part of this is how you divided the tournaments by show match, daily / weekly / monthly ect. Awesome job!
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thanks for the graphs , way too high resolution imo lol
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This is awesome hotness, thanks Thrie!
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Cool! I wonder why EU has so much more prize money on smaller events?
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Very informative. Are you willing to expose/share your database? There are sure to be other uses for it + useful for error checking.
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At the moment I have just collected data from Liquipedia and formatted it for easier graphing. I'm working on getting it all into a database of my own and would definitely be interested in having other community members QC/QA as well as use it for other analyses.
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Holy shat Europe.
You guys are so far ahead.
Post again next year!
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Great work!
I'm hoping for some kind of analysis on the prize money distribution - for instance, in the GSL, the prize money is very top-heavy and hence all that money benefits mainly only 1st place.
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On February 21 2012 12:32 Azzur wrote:
Great work!
I'm hoping for some kind of analysis on the prize money distribution - for instance, in the GSL, the prize money is very top-heavy and hence all that money benefits mainly only 1st place.
What kind of analysis are you hoping for? You just analyzed it yourself in <1 sentence.
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On February 21 2012 13:21 Xeris wrote:Show nested quote +On February 21 2012 12:32 Azzur wrote:
Great work!
I'm hoping for some kind of analysis on the prize money distribution - for instance, in the GSL, the prize money is very top-heavy and hence all that money benefits mainly only 1st place. What kind of analysis are you hoping for? You just analyzed it yourself in <1 sentence.
Well, I'm interesting in the following questions:
- How does NA, EU, KR, Other distribute prize money?
- Does small tournaments distribute more evenly?
etc.
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On February 21 2012 12:32 Azzur wrote:
Great work!
I'm hoping for some kind of analysis on the prize money distribution - for instance, in the GSL, the prize money is very top-heavy and hence all that money benefits mainly only 1st place.
1st place is about 29% of all GSL money, and about 42% of Code S money, but Code A/S is essentially one tournament now so if we use the 29% figure, it is not particularly top heavy. For example, the people that get knocked out in the Round of 32 account for approximately 18% of Code S money.
20-40% allotted for first is not bad at all depending on the size of the tournament, and a bunch of other factors. For a point of reference, in poker tournaments a common distribution is 50% of the prizepool going towards first in a 10 player tournament, with that number decreasing as the participants go higher. Even for 500 people, a 30%+ distribution is not considered high for first place.
I believe the prizepool distribution is carefully considered since the korean pro scene is in close communications with GSL organizers. There is a both a need to have a large first place prize pool for marketing purposes, and an incentive to flatten payments so that top pros that aren't winning can still make a livable salary. Without in depth knowledge of the financial aspect of individual teams, it's hard to say what is the correct payment scale to use. With team houses and bills being paid for, I think pros make a passable living just by making Code S or floundering in Code A every now and then, along with streaming and winning smaller cup tournaments.
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On February 21 2012 15:26 duracell wrote:Show nested quote +On February 21 2012 12:32 Azzur wrote:
Great work!
I'm hoping for some kind of analysis on the prize money distribution - for instance, in the GSL, the prize money is very top-heavy and hence all that money benefits mainly only 1st place. 1st place is about 29% of all GSL money, and about 42% of Code S money, but Code A/S is essentially one tournament now so if we use the 29% figure, it is not particularly top heavy. For example, the people that get knocked out in the Round of 32 account for approximately 18% of Code S money. 20-40% allotted for first is not bad at all depending on the size of the tournament, and a bunch of other factors. For a point of reference, in poker tournaments a common distribution is 50% of the prizepool going towards first in a 10 player tournament, with that number decreasing as the participants go higher. Even for 500 people, a 30%+ distribution is not considered high for first place. I believe the prizepool distribution is carefully considered since the korean pro scene is in close communications with GSL organizers. There is a both a need to have a large first place prize pool for marketing purposes, and an incentive to flatten payments so that top pros that aren't winning can still make a livable salary. Without in depth knowledge of the financial aspect of individual teams, it's hard to say what is the correct payment scale to use. With team houses and bills being paid for, I think pros make a passable living just by making Code S or floundering in Code A every now and then, along with streaming and winning smaller cup tournaments.
Thanks! This is quite insightful - I didn't know that the prize pool structure was actually wanted by the pros!
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Thanks for such a great post. It's quite cool to be able to look and see where all the money is coming in from. Looking at the growth over the past year and a half (has it been that long already???) really makes me hopeful for the future of the scene. I really think that it's just going to continue to grow and grow.
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On January 29 2012 10:30 Sabu113 wrote:
Very nice thank you. Once again as everyone has already stated, it's incredible how little MLG had to invest last year compared to what they got and their rivals.
edit: It would be interesting if we could add estimated invite cost to MLG. (but then IPL gets some +s too I believe)
How littled they invested? Are you looking at the chart that says only GSL gave out more in prize money than MLG? And prize money is just a small fraction of an investment. They brought in satellite trucks to broadcast their tournaments because of sc2. That cost more than their prize pools.
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After 2 years and SC2 is still growing. Great news.
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EPT
