Ofcourse, this doesn’t take into account coach/team/org cuts and whatnot - just purely splitting the prize pool evenly amongst the 5 players. But:
TI10 : 18,208,300$ total or 3.641mil per player.
TI12 : 1,421,710$ total or 284k per player
Roughly each player made 2.5x more money at TI in 2021 than the whole team made at TI12.
Pretty wild!
This always seemed as a “fuck you” or “do it yourself” of sorts to the players from Valve. 40m was way too large of a prizepool for what the players actually do for the community or valve in terms of promotion and sponsors. This isn’t the NFL or even lower level sports orgs. They don’t have the same branding power outside maybe China.
Valve basically said you think you’re all that? How about we made a prizepool to reflect the communities commitment to the players (current compendium focused on the talent and event) vs a commitment to the community (limited time game modes, cosmetics ect) and the community clearly didn’t give a shit about the players enough to find the prize pool anywhere close to the recent numbers.
Valve gotta eat too, and I think they decided to focus on gameplay and keeping active players playing than juice up the prize pool for the top 0.1% of players.