How Many Gamers Play Esports Worldwide

First, let’s take a look at the whole esports picture. Here’s how much money has been awarded to gamers from the top ten esports across all years combined.

• Dota 2 ($178.07 million, paid to 2929 players, over 1088 tournaments)
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive ($74.65 million, paid to 11536 players, over 4023 tournaments)
• League of Legends ($66.23 million, paid to 6242 players, over 2247 tournaments)
• StarCraft II ($30.11 million, paid to 1901 players, over 5324 tournaments)
• Fortnite ($26.61 million, paid to 2320 players, over 291 tournaments)
• Heroes of the Storm ($17.92 million, paid to 1178 players, over 446 tournaments)
• Hearthstone ($16.90 million, paid to 2132 players, over 828 tournaments)
• Overwatch ($13.66 million, paid to 3017 players, over 645 tournaments)
• Counter-Strike ($13.24 million, paid to 3938 players, over 943 tournaments)
• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds ($10.52 million, paid to 1580 players, over 131 tournaments)

Fortnite is already going all out this year, and Epic Games has promised to provide $100 million in prizes across all of their 2019 tournaments! Impressive! But these numbers aren’t too straightforward though, and can be either misleading or even more shocking when you take into consideration the peak number of players for each game. So let’s take a deeper look at what those numbers mean to each games’ playerbase.

Based on 2017 records, League of Legends had 100 million players worldwide, Call of Duty had 28.1 million, Hearthstone with 23.9 million, and Dota 2 at 12.6 million. Since 2017, Fortnite and Apex Legends have stormed into the eSports scene. Apex Legends has around 50 million registered players and Fortnite has around 250 million registered players. However, whereas it took Fortnite 16 weeks to reach 45 million players, it only took Apex Legends four weeks to accomplish that!

Let’s look at Steam’s stats for the most peak current players. Steam is online game market for digital game and DLC releases. Out of the over 30,000 games that are available through Steam, the top ten online current playerbase games of the past 30 days are:

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• Dota 2: 316,917 current players. (997,341 peak players)
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: 212,169 current players. (588,452 peak players)
• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds: 183,258 current players. (832,876 peak players)
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege: 45,691 current players. (112,971 peak players)
• Team Fortress 2: 40,876 current players. (55,507 peak players)
• Grand Theft Auto V: 38,112 current players. (107,232 peak players)
• Rocket League: 34,657 current players. (69,472 peak players)
• Warframe: 34,021 current players. (92,631 peak players)
• Rust: 32,777 current players. (67,338 peak players players)
• Mordhau: 30,388 current players. (60,204 peak players)

As for the top concurrent peak player records, here are the Steam top ten:

• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds: 3,236,027 (Jan 2018)
• Dota 2: 1,291,328 (Mar 2016)
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: 850,485 (Apr 2016)
• Fallout 4: 471,955 (Nov 2015)
• Grand Theft Auto V: 360,761 (Apr 2015)
• Hitman 2: 356,867 (Dec 2018)
• Monster Hunter: World 329,33 (Aug 2018)
• Kholat 275,043 (Feb 2019)
• Payday 2 247,628 (Jun 2017)

Now let’s take a look at the peak amount of players today for the top ten games on all of Steam:

• Dota 2: 874,040 peak players
• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds: 727,205 peak players
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: 492,619 peak players
• Grand Theft Auto V: 90,745 peak players
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege: 84,482 peak players
• Team Fortress 2: 43,785 peak players
• Rocket League: 58,246 peak players
• Warframe 57,143 peak players
• Rust: 43,979 peak players
• Mordhau: 41,128 peak players.

To give some more perspective, League of Legends claims to have over 100 million players each month in 2018, and Dota 2 has had 11,959,178 unique players in the past month, despite having much higher overall Esports prize pool payouts.

Sources:

https://steamcharts.com/

https://store.steampowered.com/stats/