Top eSports players in South Korea 2025, by total prize money earned

As of January 2025, Lee Sang Hyeok, also known as "Faker", has earned around 1.8 million U.S. dollars in prize money. This makes him the top South Korean earner of prize money from e-sports tournaments. Overall, Korean eSports players have won a total of over 153.1 million dollars across around 9,000 tournaments. South Korea ranks third worldwide in terms of earnings, behind China and the United States.

League of Legends

Lee has earned all of his prize money from League of Legends tournaments. League of Legends, often referred to as LoL, is a free-to-play MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game developed by Riot Games. Even though the game is more than a decade old, it is still enjoying a major popularity among South Koreans. As of October 2024, almost 40 percent of the total playtime in so-called PC bangs was accumulated by League of Legends.

E-sports

E-sports are a big part of modern South Korean culture. After the PC bangs, a type of LAN gaming center, formed from regular internet cafés in the early 2000s, they became a hotspot for gamers, both casual and professional. PC gamers use those spaces to meet with their peers and use the high-end computers provided to play games. As users usually play multiplayer games in those facilities, competitions quickly emerged and even got funded by the government as well as big South Korean companies. South Korea was the first country to build a stadium dedicated to e-sports. To this day, gaming and e-sports are enjoyed by many in the country.