Esports Once Out-Earned the Masters. Then the Money Just Vanished

In 2021, Dota 2’s annual world championship, The International, awarded a total prize pool of $40 million. That’s not a typo. A video game tournament, funded almost entirely by fans buying digital in-game items, outpaced the total prize money of golf’s Masters, tennis’s US Open, and most professional sports championships on earth, combined.

By 2024, that same tournament’s prize pool had collapsed to $2.6 million. A 93 percent drop in three years, for the exact same event.

How the boom actually worked

The International’s prize pool was never funded like a normal sporting event. Publisher Valve set a modest base amount, and then let the community fund the rest through something called the Compendium, essentially a season pass that added a slice of every purchase directly to the prize pool. Fans weren’t just watching. They were literally building the trophy money themselves, one purchase at a time.

This system produced genuinely staggering numbers. The 2015 tournament crowdfunded over $9 million on top of a $1.6 million base, pushing the total past $18 million, a record at the time that eclipsed the Cricket World Cup and NBA Finals prize pools. The trend kept compounding for years, eventually peaking at that extraordinary $40 million figure in 2021, all generated by fan spending on cosmetic items inside a video game.

Why it fell apart so fast

The crash wasn’t triggered by declining interest in Dota 2 itself. It came from a deliberate strategic shift by Valve. In 2023, the publisher scrapped its Dota Pro Circuit and scaled back the Compendium significantly, replacing the crowdfunding engine that had powered a decade of ballooning prize pools with something far more modest.

The reasoning reportedly involved spreading resources across more tournaments throughout the year rather than building toward one enormous annual peak, alongside broader shifts in how third-party organizers like ESL and PGL now structure esports economics around media rights and sponsorship deals rather than pure fan-funded prize pools. Other esports titles, including Counter-Strike 2, have since overtaken Dota 2 in total annual prize money as a result.

What this proves about esports economics

The traditional sports world spent years treating The International’s crowdfunded peak as proof that esports had arrived as a serious financial rival to legacy sports. That comparison always rested on shakier ground than it appeared to at the time. Golf’s Masters purse grows slowly and predictably, backed by sponsorship contracts and broadcast deals built over decades. Dota 2’s peak prize pool was built on a single publisher’s willingness to let one specific fundraising mechanism run wild, which meant it could evaporate the moment that publisher decided to change strategy.

Esports overall hasn’t collapsed. The 2026 Esports World Cup in Riyadh carries a reported $75 million total prize pool across two dozen games, the largest single esports event ever assembled, just funded through an entirely different model built on direct organizational investment rather than fan crowdfunding.

The lesson isn’t that esports money was fake. It’s that prize pools built on a single volatile funding mechanism were never as stable as the headline numbers made them look, and treating one extraordinary year as the new normal was a mistake sports media made too quickly.

Does a prize pool’s legitimacy depend on how sustainably it’s funded, or does the money mean the same thing to the players regardless of where it came from?