10. Call of Duty
- Lifetime Prize Pool: $1,204,802.00 (60 Black Ops 4 tournaments)
- Highest Earning Player: N/A
Similarly to EA, Activision Blizzard is a publisher highly motivated to invest and promote esports events for its games. That’s why we haven’t named a specific Call of Duty game here; you can bank on any iteration of the franchise to be featured in dozens of esports competitions around the world every year. And yes, the prize pool figure is less than FIFA 19, but there are multiple tournaments being run for multiple versions of Call of Duty in 2019, so it’s really not comparable.
If you want to get really serious, Activision Blizzard is about to take Call of Duty esports to similar heights as Overwatch. The publisher is about to launch a similar city-based franchise league for the popular franchise, in which teams are paid substantial salaries and have the opportunity to win massive prize pools.
It’s unclear yet whether this tournament will change Call of Duty games each with the annual release strategy that the franchise follows.
The new format will succeed the current Call of Duty World League, a 16-team tournament that has been running since 2016. This year’s prize pool is around $6 million dollars, up from $4 million last year.
Call of Duty’s popularity is so widespread, though, that there’s an opportunity to win decent earnings at the amateur/semi-professional level. Dozens of smaller tournaments and online leagues offer prizes for talented players to win. And where the annualized releases of Call of Duty games hold it back somewhat from being a top-tier esport, it probably plays into the hands of semi-professional players who can quickly get good at a new version.
