The business of play: careers and earnings in elite esports

Abstract Esports has emerged as a major sector of the global entertainment industry, with prize structures designed by tournament organisers and game publishers that concentrate rewards on a small elite. We analyse career duration and prize earnings using a 1999–2024 player-year panel of 846 elite players from 62 countries, drawn from publicly available tournament records. Career duration is modelled using parametric accelerated failure-time and truncated negative binomial specifications; annual prize earnings are modelled in logarithms using fixed-effects panel regressions on age bands, format, region, and period. Three findings stand out. First, exit hazards are highest in the early years of a career and decline among survivors, with longer careers for players who enter the elite circuit younger. Second, prize earnings are highly concentrated, with Gini coefficients above 0.7 across the panel and rising in the upper tail. Third, real prize earnings have grown rapidly in team formats and have been broadly stagnant in individual formats, consistent with publishers using prize-pool escalation as a primary lever for sustaining effort and competitive intensity in flagship team titles. We interpret these patterns through the lens of rank-order tournament theory (Lazear and Rosen, 1981; Rosen, 1986), which provides a natural framework for understanding how top-heavy prize design shapes selection, retention, and the distribution of earnings in elite esports careers.