A gamer winning 10 million dollars? Today, esports attract audiences and prize pools that can compete with traditional sports competitions. Or perhaps you simply play for fun. These are the most popular online multiplayer games of the moment – and, in many cases, of the past few years.
Never heard of Dota 2? Yet the best players of this online game earned 47 million dollars together from it last year. Fortnite, which you probably do know, did even better, but the list of the most popular online games making waves in eSports includes quite a few titles that are less well known to the public. Games that are played professionally, by professional teams, with prize pools and spectator numbers that are making traditional sports competitions increasingly nervous.
Battle royale games are relatively recent and have become hugely popular in recent years. They drop you with dozens of other players onto a vast map, after which everyone goes head-to-head solo or in teams until only one winner remains. Fortnite wasn’t the first in this genre, but it is one of the biggest. It’s a cartoonish-looking shooter with a special twist: you can build obstacles and other structures to gain an advantage over the opposition. Fortnite Battle Royale is available on PC, iOS, PS4, Xbox One, Switch and Android.
League of Legends is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, or MOBA for short. In games like these, players, from a top-down perspective and in teams, each control a unique character with unique abilities. Through tight offensive and/or defensive teamwork, each team tries to capture the opponent’s base while the other side attempts the same with yours. It’s a strong, highly competitive mix of strategy and role-playing gameplay, in a genre where League of Legends reigns alongside Dota 2. League of Legends is available on PC and Mac.
Global Offensive is the reincarnation of Counter-Strike, one of the oldest online multiplayer shooters, and itself has been at the top of the genre for around eight years now. It’s a ruthless shooter that demands the utmost of your reflexes and hand–eye coordination. Depending on the objective, the team playing as Terrorists must plant a bomb or guard hostages, while the Counter-Terrorist unit must prevent the planting, defuse the bomb, or rescue those hostages. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is available on PC, Mac, PS3 and Xbox 360.
Competitive trading card games are nothing new – think of Magic: The Gathering – but Hearthstone is undoubtedly the most successful digital translation of that formula. Assemble your deck according to your strategy and play your cards tactically against your opponent. With dozens of new sets each year, Hearthstone regularly brings something new to the millions of fans who try to quite literally wipe each other off the table every day at every level. Hearthstone is available on PC, Mac, Android and iOS.
Known as PUBG for short, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is, together with Fortnite, one of the most popular games in the Battle Royale genre. Here, however, there are no cartoony, colourful characters building walls and towers; instead, it features realistic weaponry, ballistic models, and an arsenal you must first scavenge or loot from your victims. The playing field shrinks from a sprawling map to an ever-smaller circle in which ever fewer surviving participants vie to be the last man/team standing. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is available on PC, PS4, Xbox One, Android and iOS.
Few games have made a comeback like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. After a disappointing release 5 years ago, the player count has steadily risen to an impressive 55 million. It’s an extremely tactical first-person shooter in which a team of 5 attackers, each with unique special gadgets, tries to plant a bomb while 5 equally uniquely equipped defenders must prevent that. A spicy detail: large parts of the relatively small maps can be both reinforced and destroyed. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
Not every Call of Duty game scores equally well in terms of online player numbers, but predecessor Black Ops IIII is still doing very well today and the most recent, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, is doing even better. It’s a military first-person shooter in which players face off in teams of 2, 6, 10 or 32 on small to very expansive maps, across a range of modes that gains more variety with each update. Extra nice about this Modern Warfare edition: you can play together with players on other platforms, and each of those updates is completely free. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
Together with League of Legends, Dota 2 stands firmly at the top of online games in the MOBA genre. 2 teams of 5 players, with tactically chosen characters, try to destroy the ‘Ancient’ in the opponent’s base. Here too, you get an enormously deep and competitive mix of unique characters and special abilities with a fantasy flair. And, as with every other game in this list, Dota 2 is played at a high level in internationally organised esports tournaments for large prize pools – and watched online by millions! You can play Dota 2 on PC and Mac.
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