Lest anyone thinks that this is not big business, the largest prize pool in gaming is the Dota International (held once a year).
It's currently sitting at > $12m (split between 5 players on a team, their manager, and who knows who else). It will probably rise to over $15m by the time the tournament is on.
Of interest is that the prize pool comes from the "normal" players playing the game - you buy in game items, and 25% of the revenue from that goes to the prize pool for the tournament. The items themselves are completely optional and cosmetic only. And, of course, valve takes the other 75%.
Not disagreeing, but they probably use a large portion of that money to actually pay for the organization, venue, designs of the compendium, the staffs, and everything else involved with the International. All that can't be cheap so I'm not sure which portion of that 75% is valve's profit. Does anybody have any ideas?
I don't think it's really meaningful to look at it like that. The tournament isn't funded specifically by sales of the items which contribute to the prize pool; it's just a general marketing expense to increase the number of players. Even if everyone decided to boycott compendiums for some reason, the whole thing could be a net profit if they spent the same amount of money in the dota store on other things (actually, it'd be more profitable...).
The winning team doesn't take the entire 12 million, thats the prizepool for the entire tournament. However its still a lot of money. If you qualified for the LAN finals you're getting a piece of that. If you look at http://www.esportsearnings.com/players, the top 5 players were the 5 players on team Newbee, the International 4 champions from last year. They each made over 1 million dollars from that one tournament.
It's currently sitting at > $12m (split between 5 players on a team, their manager, and who knows who else). It will probably rise to over $15m by the time the tournament is on.
Of interest is that the prize pool comes from the "normal" players playing the game - you buy in game items, and 25% of the revenue from that goes to the prize pool for the tournament. The items themselves are completely optional and cosmetic only. And, of course, valve takes the other 75%.