Which countries are best at esports? 2026 update

Analysis of the top 30 esports games to make a global ranking

Given the ease of obtaining scraped datasets with Claude Code, I thought we could update my 2019 study of mental sports with the newest data and better methods. The primary source of data is https://www.esportsearnings.com/ which tracks winnings for esports across games. These are then aggregated by player, country, game etc. in various ways. It’s possible to get the listings of all competitive players for a given game, so these can be used to calculate competitive players per capita rates for individual games. These numbers are subject to the usual small-n instability, but show reasonable correlations:

Generally, the correlations are positive as expected -- countries that have more top players per capita in one game also have more in other games -- but not entirely so. There are some clear clusters in the data related to game type and platform (PC vs. mobile). The top left cluster are mobile games. Chess.com is also there as the only non-esport of sorts, even though it is played on a computer. It’s mostly uncorrelated with the others. These are the top 30 games, which is an arbitrary number I chose, and one could pick a larger number. Since I wanted to do factor analysis on these variables with ~150 countries, I cannot have too many games as it makes the results potentially unstable.

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