'Dota 2' team receives Guinness World Record for $9 million win

LOS ANGELES -- Team Wings received a Guinness World Record on Friday after scoring the biggest winnings for a single esports event: $9,139,002 for the Dota 2 International 2016 championship.

Winning the Seattle summer tournament secured them almost half the record-breaking $20,000,000 prize pool -- further proof that esports is well on its way to becoming a billion dollar industry.

Dota 2 used a crowdfunding method of growing the prize from its original $1,600,000, which is funded by Valve. The game developer offers a "Battle Pass" as in-game downloadable content in Dota 2, which can cost nearly $30, a quarter of which goes to the prize pool.

Valve has been using this method since 2013 and has raised a grand total of $52,468,328 across various Dota tournaments.

This isn't the first time Dota has made it in the Guinness World Record book; the game had a two page spread in 2014 for most monthly users with 3 million.

You can watch Wings Gaming in their next Dota 2 tournament, The Boston Major, happening December 7-10. The total prize for that tourney is $3,000,000.