When it comes to making serious cash with eSports, there are few more lucrative games than Valve’s Dota 2.
That rings true for the Evil Geniuses professional gaming team, which just took home a staggering $6.63 million in prize money after winning the Dota 2 International Championships.
The tournament, which typically has the biggest prize pool in eSports, offered up a total $18 million in potential winnings.
The Evil Geniuses beat rivals CDEC three games to one in a best of five at Seattle’s Key Arena, a packed stadium that holds over 17,000 people.
Evil Geniuses is a big US-based eSports organisation that began as a CounterStrike team, but now has teams competing across various games including League of Legends, StarCraft 2, World of Warcraft, and Halo.
One of the members of the Dota 2 team is Pakistani gaming prodigy Sumail “Suma1L” Hassan Syed, who is now a millionaire at the age of 16 years old.
In his first year of playing so far, he’s estimated to have earned around $1.6 million.
The second-place team, China’s CDEC, didn’t go home empty-handed however, earning an impressive $2.8 million in Dota 2 tournament spoils at the International.
You can watch the full Grand Final match below:
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Related: What are eSports? A beginner’s guide to pro gaming
Dota 2 is a MOBA, or multiplayer online battle arena game – it’s just like League of Legends, and is based on the DotA mod of Blizzard’s Warcraft 3.
Two teams of five players play as distinct “hero” characters and compete to destroy the other’s respective stronghold.
The game first launched back in July 2013, and is one of the most actively played games on Steam, seeing daily peaks of over 800,000 concurrent players.
Check out our PS4 vs Xbox One video below:
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.