eSport Rankings FAQ

What are the eSport Rankings?

A list of games that we at PGT believe to be the best eSports. Gamers who want to go professional can use these rankings to tell what games are the most popular and best paying eSports. The highest ranked eSport is the one if you were to become the best in what would make you the most money, gain you the most recognition and has the highest level of competition. We give priority to growing eSports so gamers who choose an eSport today can feel confident training with the knowledge that the eSport won't die in a few months or years.

Where do you get the total cash prize pool for the eSports you list?

The total cash prize pool listed on the eSport Rankings page is the total amount of prizes from our tournament database. Our database tracks every tournament from 2010 up until today. This means that for eSports such as CS 1.6, the total prizes range from 2010 to the present and not from its release date.

All tournaments are researched manually and no automation is used. All tournaments used can be seen on the tournaments page of the website along with a link to the source. At PGT we are dedicated to having up to date tournament information. We only include tournaments with $1,000 prize pool or greater for the total number of tournaments.

What is the purpose of the eSport Rankings?

To provide gamers information on different games by comparing each title's quality and contribution to competitive gaming.

What determines the quality of an eSport? 

• Lifespan of the game
• Total of tournament cash prize pools
• Frequency of tournaments
• Historical and future trends
• Sponsorship
• Salaries
• Release date
• Media Rating

Why base your rankings on the above list?

Life span - Possibly the most important factor to any game is how long it will last. The information we use to gauge a game's lifespan is as follows:

• Frequency or potential for a sequel. For example, when StarCraft 2 arrived, StarCraft lost a major chunk of the playerbase. This is where we factor it in.
• Learning curve between sequels - Just because a new game is out doesn't mean a professional gamer wasted their time on the original title. This factor requires research into future releases to determine if a new release will carry gamers over with their skill set and knowledge intact or disregard the effort spent and redesign their thought process to adapt to the sequel.
• Community size and trending information - It would be nice if we could ignore this and focus entirely on sequels and when a new sequel is released, disregard the old one but this would mean ignoring some of the most popular eSports. Counter Strike 1.6 is the best of example of this as it continues to have a larger community then many of its sequels.
• After release, how many developers stick around to support the game and implement changes that make competitive sense.
• The frequency of new content added to the game, bugs patched and player feedback implemented.
• User ability to contribute content, the level of difficulty to implement and the rewards of creating that content.

Total tournament cash prizes - This is an important but simple factor where the total cash prizes are factored in along with a positive or negative trend of tournament prize pool amounts.

Frequency of tournaments - Increases an eSport's ranking as the frequency of tournaments increases. We use frequency and not total because it provides a more up to date information. For example:

DotA may have had 10 tournaments in July of 2010 but 1 tournament in July 2011, hence showing 11 tournaments in total. Compare this with LoL that may have had 1 tournament in July 2010 but 10 tournaments in July 2011.

If you simply look at total tournaments, both DotA and LoL would receive the same boost to rank. But looking at the frequency of tournaments from the current date, LoL will have a significant boost to ranking compared to DotA because not only did it have more tournaments recently, it has a positive trend in tournament frequency where DotA would have a negative decay in tournament frequency.

Historical and Future Trends - This is where we look at the game as a whole and determine if it has a overall positive trend of more tournaments, more prizes and more community or a negative trend. We also look at historical trends for previous sequels where applicable. For example, when you compare StarCraft to StarCraft 2 you can clearly see a more global positive trend for StarCraft 2. This means there are more viewers, sponsors, tournaments, leagues, popularity for StarCraft 2 around the world and has the potential of becoming much more popular than the original. The original was popular in Korea but never became such a success in any other country but with StarCraft 2, we see many top tours around the world competing with Korea's GSL.

Sponsorship - Paying for a computer, gaming equipment and travel expenses cut into your earnings making this one of the easiest factors to explain. Here it is! The more active sponsors they have, the higher the rank.

Salaries - Just like in real life sports, professional athletes get salaries. Although the wheels turn somewhat slow in the eSports world, tournament winners and consistent performers usually secure salaries. The more and higher the salaries, the higher the rank for the eSport.

Release Date - This is possibly one of the least important factors but is given some weight as even the best games in history decline in popularity given enough time.

Media rating - We want to provide information to gamers about how popular an eSport is and will continue to be in the future. We also wanted to avoid listing a large amount of information, so we combined it and turned it into a convenient rating format. The media rating factor of our ranking is based on the following: 

• News Articles
• Blogs
• Websites
• Live streams
• Television channels
• Search queries
• Sponsor promotion
• Global interest

Why base the media rating on the above list?

The aforementioned factors were chosen as we believe they accurately represent the amount of media attention an eSport receives. For gamers, a higher media rating is always better!

What does a media rating mean for advertisers/sponsors/writers?

We do not list this ratio on our eSport rankings page as that is strictly for gamers. For those who are interested, here is the information you need:

• The best eSports to sponsor are ones with the high media rating and low prize pool.

This is because with a high media rating you have a game that is incredibly popular and using the same amount of money generates much more traffic or sales than a different game with a low media rating or an already large total tournament prize pool. Simply put, this means there is a lack of sponsorship and huge gains to be made. 

• The best eSports for advertisers and writers are ones with low media rating and high prize pool.

With a low media rating and a high prize pool, the eSport is receiving a lot of sponsorship but not enough news coverage. So for writers and bloggers, this is your ideal eSport to write about! The low media rating means little news competition compared to other eSports!

Why don't you show more information on the eSport rankings page?

We wanted to keep the eSport rankings simple We do all the research and calculations and provide you with the eSport rankings that allow the gamers to choose their next game knowing that a high ranked eSport not only has a large amount of cash prize tournaments but will have more cash prize tournaments in the near future.

We have added the eSport Statistics page which has all the pretty graphs and charts you could wish for!