Fantasy esports site Vulcun increases its 2015 prize pool to $10M

One of the top fantasy esports sites is putting a serious amount of cash on the line for the rest of the year.

Vulcun, the DraftKings of esports, just announced that it is bumping its 2015 prize pool from $4 million to $10 million. The site enables players to compete for real cash prizes by picking teams of pro players in games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. This increase represents the huge interest in competitive gaming. Esports — the events, livestreams, and fantasy sports — will make around $465 million by 2017, according to New Zoo, and Vulcun is one of the companies contributing to that growth.

“Gamers are very competitive,” Vulcun founder and boss Ali Moiz told GamesBeat. “They love to win and be the best. However, most will never get the chance to go pro. Vulcun lets them compete and share some of the thrill — and prize money — of going pro.”

Vulcun has paid out $1.5 million to its players over the last three months, and that number should balloon significantly through the rest of the year. And Vulcun isn’t even the only company in this space — it already has competition in the form of AlphaDraft, which is another daily fantasy esports site.

And esports fans are not the only people wagering in this space. Vulcun raised $12 million in funding in April from capital firms like Sequoia, which led that round, and Matrix Partners. AlphaDraft, separately, raised $5 million led by Metamorphic Ventures. Clearly, people with money see this space as having big potential.

The market for pro football fantasy sports is gargantuan at $70 billion. And while esports is a minute fraction of that, the investors in Vulcun see it as having that kind of potential.

Josh Hannah at Matrix Partners says that esports have NFL-like potential with “truly global fan bases and games that today’s youth relate to.” And with fewer young people participating in high-school sports like football and baseball, that trend could easily launch esports to new heights over the next several decades.