Lee “Infiltration” Seon-woo won six Evo gold medals across four different fighting games between 2012 and 2019, making him one of the most prominent competitors the genre has ever seen. The South Korean player’s name was a shoo-in for “best in the business” conversations, and as sponsors lined up, the unlikely possibility of making a comfortable living via fighting game eSports was suddenly a very real reality for him.
Momentum abruptly ended in the latter half of 2018, however, when domestic abuse allegations brought Infiltration’s professional gaming career to a screeching halt. Here some six years later, he’s produced a video detailing his side of the story, and in it he reports that he was making over $150,000 USD annually for playing games like Street Fighter.
Infiltration spends the bulk of the video’s 42 minute runtime recounting the details leading up to, during, and following legal troubles with his ex-wife. In his closing remarks, however, he discusses the contracts he had at the time with both Monster Energy and Panda Global.
“The two-year contract I signed with Monster Energy, which offered an annual salary of $30,000 at the time, was terminated without [my] receiving a single penny,” Infiltration says. “And the contract I signed with Panda Global, which had been set for three years with an annual salary of $125,000, was also terminated,” he finishes.
It’s hard enough to make a living playing video games, but certain genres have seen immense success in the eSports realm and thus such paths have been carved. Though it’s clearly en route to join such ranks, the fighting game genre has long struggled to be included in conversations with the likes of first person shooter and MOBA titles.
In 2013, the year after Infiltration won his first Evo, victor GG|Xian famously made less than $6,000 USD after winning the 1,600+entrant Street Fighter 4 bracket.
It was around the time of Infiltration’s FGC departure that we saw teams like Echo Fox forced to close the book on their fighting game divisions after a few years of sponsoring world class players. Happenings such as this further reinforced the idea that professional careers in fighting games still weren’t all that feasible in 2018, especially since the potential for $150,000 annual salaries was widely unheard of to the public.
Capcom has been doing a lot to change this in recent years thanks to its unprecedented $2 million prize pool for Capcom Cup X. They are reducing the overall prize pool for Capcom Cup XI, but the winner will still walk away with $1 million USD.
