Sources: Paris Major sticker earnings exceeded $110 million

The Paris Major was by far the most successful Major of all time when it comes to sticker sales.

Qualifying for a Major has become an extremely lucrative endeavor. In recent years, earnings from the sales of team and player stickers have been growing exponentially, dwarfing the $1 million prize pot on offer.

In 2019, Valve revealed that stickers from StarLadder Major Berlin paid out over $11 million to the participating teams and players.

With CS:GO's popularity continuing to rise and the COVID pandemic putting Majors on hold for nearly two years, that payout increased three-fold. The PGL Stockholm and Antwerp tournaments in 2021-2022 paid out a whopping $70 million combined, according to a Valve blog post celebrating the game's 10th anniversary.

Nothing can quite compare to last year’s BLAST.tv Paris Major, however. According to information gathered by HLTV and Dust2 Brasil from various team sources who wish to remain anonymous, the total earnings from the most recent Major alone surpassed a staggering $110 million.

This amounts to $4.5 million per team on average but differs based on sales of each capsule, which is divided equally between the eight teams (for team capsules) or 40 players (for signature capsules) in it. It is worth noting that these numbers don't include Vitality's Champions capsule.

Teams and players in the Contender capsules came away with the largest piece of the pie, approximately $4.5 million per team plus $250,000 per player, followed by the Legends, who earned $3.5 million per team and $200,000 per player, and the Challengers with $2.6 million per team and $200,000 per player.

Contenders
ENCE
MOUZ
Liquid
Grayhound
Complexity
The MongolZ
Fluxo
FaZe Legends
Natus Vincere
9INE
FURIA
fnatic
HEROIC
Into the Breach
Vitality
Bad News Eagles Challengers
Monte
paiN
G2
GamerLegion
FORZE
Apeks
Ninjas in Pyjamas
OG

The massive increase of interest in the latest Major’s digital items comes down to a few factors. The stickers were on the market for nearly five months (May 4-September 27) likely because the Paris Major was the only one to take place in 2023 in preparation for the switch to Counter-Strike 2.

The new game’s arrival early in the year also smashed player records while the stickers were on the market, with the average player count surpassing 1 million for the first time ever in May and June.

Player records were being smashed while the Paris Major stickers were on the market from May-September (Source: Steamcharts)

Such a height is unlikely to be reached again at a single Major anytime soon considering two Majors a year will be held again from 2024 on, but the trend shows just how much participating at one means.

It also helps explain the increased activity on the transfer market in the five months leading up to the qualifying process for the PGL CS2 Major, which has just begun with the open phase. New organizations were desperate to enter the Counter-Strike space and many established ones scrambled to skip as many qualifying stages as they could and build teams competitive enough to make it to Copenhagen.

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