JerAx, a professional Dota 2 player who was at the top of his game in 2019, earned 11,000% more than the average cashier last year, which is simply astonishing.
Jesse Vainikka has been on the scene since 2013, when the Finnish gamer moved to Stockholm, Sweden to join the QPAD Red Pandas. However, his career has gone through highs and lows, and it isn't the rocket-fuelled shoot for the stars that you might expect. In 2015, he moved to Korea to become a member of MVP HOT6ix. The team's performance was sensational and they looked to be unbeatable until Invictus Gaming dashed their dreams at The International 2015. He joined OG in 2016, which showed early promise, before the fickleness of fortune led to a number of losses.
Not to be deterred, the team secured a series of good results and high placements in the second half of the season last year. OG won The International, snatching victory from the jaws of Team Liquid, and then JerAx announced his retirement in early 2020. "I've grown tired from always trying to compete, getting better and aiming for a win. It conflicts with how I think, how I act and who I am," explained the esports player, and he now streams Valorant and Dota 2 on his own Twitch channel. "Games made me who I am today," he says on his Twitter profile, and it just so happens that they made him a lot of moolah, too.
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In 2019, Vainikka earned $3.16 million from his esports career, in appearances, sponsorship deals, competitions, and more. That works out to be about $190,000 per month, if an average month has 22 weekdays, and hypothetically, if his total earnings are spread equally over the course of the year. That's incredible, and especially for someone who is so young and has focused on one single path for their professional life. FandomSpot has taken this data from JerAx and compared it to much more everyday jobs, and the implications are staggering, so sit yourself down if you weren't already.
The roles range from food preparation worker, to medical assistant, to bartender, to carpenter, and so on. Charting the average annual salaries of these jobs to the percentage comparison to the best paid player of 2019, it found that it would require JerAx to work just three days to equal the total earnings of a cashier across the entire year. That's a 11,470% difference between the pay packages. In fact, in many of these roles, Vainikka wouldn't even need to work a whole week to eclipse their salaries. As a server, he would work four days; as a mechanic, he would work five days; and as a lawyer, he would work six days.
The highest paid person in the list is a marketing specialist, with just shy of $54,000 in annual earnings. JerAx generated 5,000% more money than they would in the same amount of time. This is mainly due to the reason that these esports competitions have huge prize pools: The International 2019 saw its winnings surge over $34 million. Next year, this competition will offer its champions a slice of a cake worth more than $40 million. That's some baked confectionery. But, as evidenced by Vainikka's departure, this career does come with some caveats, and thankfully there are other opportunities for players to rest between seasons.
Featured Image Credit: Valve, OG