Dota 2 has set another world record today. Wings Gaming, a Chinese Dota 2 team won a huge amount of money after winning The International 6. With $9,139,002, they officially hold the Guinness World Record for the largest single first prize in an eSport tournament.
The History Of Wings Gaming
Wings Gaming is a professional eSport organization owned by ChongQing Youth Tech Ltd., a company sporting professional teams in Dota 2 and CS:GO. The Dota division was formed in 2014 and had gone through several changes until they settled with their current roster in August 2015. The team is made up of Chu "shadow" Zeyu, Zhou "bLink" Yang, Zhang "Faith_bian" Ruida, Zang "y" Yiping, and Li "iceice" Peng.
Before they reached their present dominant state, the team also had ups and downs in their earlier days. It was during April 2016 when they surprised everyone by the playstyle they displayed at ESL One Manila. The upset they made against Team Liquid was the breakthrough they needed to gain morale; and since then, Wings Gaming continued to dominate in the Dota 2 professional scene. Just recently, Wings Gaming received a direct invite to The Boston Major.
The International 6 Has The Biggest Prize Pool In The History of eSport
'The International' (TI) is an annual Dota 2 tournament hosted by Valve. Its first tournament took place during Gamescom in 2011 at Cologne, Germany with a total prize pool of $1.6 million. TI2 was held in Seattle with the same $1.6 million prize pool. For the third TI, Valve introduced a system which crowdfunds additional amount to the prize pot called 'compendiums'. 25 percent of the compendium sales go directly to the TI prize pool.
The system was carried on up to TI6. The growing community of Dota helped Valve to generate a total of $20,770,460 through compendium (now called 'Battle Pass') sales. This is 1198 percent increase from the base prize pool of $1.6 million.
