The Top 8 Richest Professional Video Game Players In The World

As it stands today, the highest paid athlete in the world is boxer Floyd Mayweather. His earnings, with no endorsements, total some $105 million dollars. Footballer Christiano Ronaldo comes in second, with his bank manager gleefully overseeing around $80 million a year. Imagine that. Getting paid such substantial amounts for doing something you love every day, something that could hardly be considered a “job” at all.

But this is the dizzying world of the professional sportsperson, this is not for us mere gamers! We’re all out of work graphic designers or stuck in dead-end IT jobs. A bespectacled World of Warcraft player’s bank account is never going to look the same as LeBron James’ ($72.3 million), is it now? I bet your parents probably said this exact sentence to you only yesterday. But oh, how misunderstood us gamers are.

Like any pro sportsman, if you’re really, really good at winning, you can rise to the top – like the delicious cream in a milky underworld of quickscoping and sexually ambiguous usernames. And then, once you’re there, you can start makin’ paper. Some pretty serious paper too, as it happens. In truth, your bank account might not quite rival that of Tiger Woods’, but you’d be surprised at just how much you could earn for a few hours worth of pwning nOObs.

So, by way of comparison, here are the seven highest game-playing earners from around the world. Read on to find out just how much they’re making (or just how much you could expect to earn if you limber up your fingers and beat them).

It should be noted that these figures are based on prize money alone, and do not take into account the extra income from sponsorship and promotions. Some even charge you to watch their practice games on Twitch. Expect to easily add an extra few thousand for all that.