How top ‘pro gamers’ now earn £800,000 a year

Gaming is starting to look awfully like a real professional sport - with top gamers earning £800,000 a year, and London building its first ‘e-Sports’ stadium.

Events such as LA’s League of Legends final drew audiences of up to 32 million online watching via streaming service Twitch - with prize pots of up to £6.5 million.

Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House is to play host to the European Call of Duty championships on 28 February.

UK company Gfinity is building Britain’s first eSports stadium in west London - in the hope London will become a global centre for gaming.

Neville Upton, Gfinity’s founder, says, ‘We’re going to build an arena that can hold 600 people. We’ll expand that capacity to thousands in 2016."

Top gamers now earn serious money - particularly playing fantasy titles such as Dota 2 and League of Legends - Jiao ‘Banana’ Wang has made nearly £1 million in 38 matches.

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When the finals of a worldwide League of Legends championship were announced at the 11,000 seat Staples Center, home of basketball’s LA Lakers last year, they sold out in less than an hour.

On Twitch TV - the gaming service recently purchased by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars - 32 million gamers ‘tuned in’.

A study this year estimated Twitch was behind 1.8% of the entire world’s internet traffic.  THe service has 55 million visitors per month, each of whom watches on average 106 minutes per day.

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Jordan ‘Jurd’ Crowley, 19, plays for British Call of Duty team TCM. He says that the atmosphere around his ‘sport’ has changed tangibly in the past couple of years.

'In 2013, e-Sports suddenly went ‘pro’,’ he says. ‘Before, you’d walk in and it would be a clique of people who you probably knew already. Suddenly, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. Personally, I love the atmosphere e at events like the Call of Duty Championship. The roaring fans and the enthusiasm of the commentators - it feels like a real sport, not something on a games console.

'The rise of live streaming has seriously increased the amount of money gamers can earn. You are always thinking of the people watching at home when competing. You don't want to let your fans down as they are the reason for being able to make a sustainable profession from gaming.’

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Audiences for games are global, and viewing figures often outpace ‘real’ sporting events including some at the such as Winter Olympics - last year 50 million hours of ‘eSports’ was watched around the world.

Since 2010, the amount of eSports watched around the world has increased by 1557%.

‘Jurd’ warns that simply being good at a game is not enough. To compete at all, players have to know every possibility in a game before it happens.

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‘Most players reach a level where they can assess a situation, react, and survive. For pro gaming, that isn’t good enough. We invest so much time that we are aware of every single situation that could happen in game and know how to deal with it. So that's the main difference for me.