Ever since the beta stages of Starcraft 2:Wings of Liberty the discussion of balance has been one of the few constants in the always growing and changing community. Often graphs displaying win-rates at various levels of play and in different regions have emerged, allowing players at all levels to have evidence of balance or imbalance to support their arguments. Up until this point however, there has not been an in-depth look at the disbursement of funds at the pro level and which race has benefited the most from the influx of prize money, that has been injected into the community by the rapid growth in premier level tournaments over the past two years.

Although in all honesty this is somewhat outside my skill set, I decided I would attempt to tackle this project myself. I started with breaking down the amount of winnings by race from the premier tournaments starting from the first GSL Open Season 1, all the way until now with the most recent tournament included study being MLG Spring Arena 2. Once I had the total winnings by each race I broke them down by month so that the trends were visible over time, this is the result..

A month by month breakdown of each races earnings from 2010 until now

There is a few disclaimers that must be stated before going in-depth on the statistics shown on this graph and any graphs/charts that follow:

1) I did the collecting, input, and calculation all manually and on my own, while I did double check all of my work and was meticulous, there is always the possibility of human error. Since the primary focus of this study is to show trends over time and not the exact dollar amounts, being off by a miniscule amount on a calculation is relatively inconsequential.

2) The charts show a large amount of volatility, especially in the earlier months of Starcraft 2 competition when the tournaments were few and far between. There are some months with 0-1 tournaments and this results in massive spikes in earnings. While this may be painfully obvious to anyone with any amount of mathematical understanding whatsoever, it is an important concept to know when analyzing graphs like this so we don't end up with people spamming forums with senseless posts claiming ''Toss suckz bcuz they won $0.00 in February!"

3) Some of the tournament histories and prize payouts are actually hard to find if the payout went deeper than the top 8. Some tournaments pay out as low as 32nd place and those people often aren't listed, while it would be possible to figure out given more time and research. The amounts paid out at those levels don't play a significant enough role to impact the study. This is the same reason I didn't include smaller events like the weeklys and online cups.

4) I basically included tournaments with around a $10,000 or greater prize pool and primarily live events. This does not account for all of the prize money awarded in Starcraft 2, only a large chunk of it at the top level of play. Enough to be a good indicator of any trends that may have occured over the past two and a half years.

5) These statistics are not meant to prove anything or make any specific argument, I just thought they would be interesting for myself and others as well.

While I found the month by month breakdown to be interesting, it is far too volatile to be taken seriously as the numbers can be skewed by just one tournament in months where there was too few premier events. I couldn't decide on the best way to show balanced trends but ultimately came to the conclusion that a 'quarterly' system would work best. Since there was only a couple of tournaments in 2010, I basically did that as one quarter, and after that every 3 months starting with January 2011 was a new quarter. This was the result :

Or if you prefer a line graph..

On the quarterly graph we can see that Terran has spent almost the entire duration of competitive Starcraft 2 at the top of the earnings race between the three races, dropping only the 1st Quarter to Zerg (which was when Fruitdealer won his whopping GSL prize). It is important to remember however that in Korea there has historically been an abundance of Terran players. So this might not speak to racial balance as much as it does to the number of top tier competitors that happen to pick Terran as their race, which is another interesting topic altogether which would be great to discuss another time.

Zerg has been the most volatile of the three races, hitting a massive low in 1st quarter 2011 and spiking at over $260,000 in 4th quarter of the same year, there are probably many reasons for Zergs climb in success but it has been clear to most that watch a lot of competitive SC2 that Zergs are doing significantly better in ZvP than they used to and recently even a lot of Terrans at the top level have made known that they are having problems with TvZ. Whether this is due to any balance changes in the game or just a 'shift in the meta-game' can't be said for sure, but it would help to compare these graphs against a history of balance changes made by Blizzard, which I plan to do in the near future.

Protoss has clearly struggled to keep up with the other two races in terms of winnings, being the only race to not break $200,000 in any given quarter. Protoss has been less volatile than the other races as well which is interesting for two reasons that stand out to me. The first being that as we will see further on in this article, Protoss has the highest % of their earnings tied up into one individual of any of the three races, which would lead one to believe that they would suffer higher amounts of volatility based on that individuals success. The second reason I find Protosses consistency interesting is the number of quite significant balance changes that have been made both directly to the Protoss race and to other races that were designed to change their respective XvP matchup (a good example would be Infestor nerf's on both Fungal Growth and Neural Parasite).

Probably the most fascinating stat found through all of this for me personally was measuring the rough total winnings from premier events for each race against the top earning player from that particular race's winnings from that same list of premier events. So far in Starcraft 2 premier events, the races have respectively won roughly:

Terran : $1,362,778.00

Zerg : $927,790.00

Protoss : $740,394.00

It will come as no surprise to anyone who follows Starcraft 2 at all that the top three earners from each race are IMMvp, IMNestea, and SKMC. Their winnings from the premier events included in these figures are as follows :

IMMvp : $275,250 (20.19% of races total earnings in premier events)

SKMC : $243,750 (32.9% of races total earnings in premier events)

IMNestea : $222,425 (23.9% of races total earnings in premier events)

This doesn't really show anything other than how awesome these 3 players are, but it is somewhat ridiculous to think that MC has won over 30% of the prize money awarded to Protoss players at premier events since SC2 has launched. Bearing this fact in mind, it is hard to dispute his self given 'Obama Toss' title.

The main disclaimer I want to make in regards to this article is that it is simply an introduction to more indepth analysis I plan to do on this subject. Currently in parts 2 and 3 I plan to go more indepth on analyzing the timeline of patch updates and how they compare to the fluctuation of prize money disbursement, as well as pro-team consistency over time. Hopefully Part 2 will come soon, If you have any other suggestions as to what might make a good or interesting angle to analyze please contact me via Twitter @JLewSC. I appreciate any and all feedback and would love to hear what the community thinks of this so far!