KSI and the Sidemen among UK’s top richest gamers and creators

High-profile YouTube stars KSI and the Sidemen have been named alongside the creators of Candy Crush, Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto as some of the richest gamers and creators in the UK.

Taking the top spot of the Sunday Times’ inaugural top 30 Gaming Rich List are co-founders of Playrix, Igor and Dmitry Bukhman.

The brothers, with a combined fortune of £12.54bn, are behind titles like Township, Fishdom and Homescapes. KSI and the Sidemen are the highest placed gamers, coming in joint 21st with £50m.

More than a quarter of the gamers and developers on the list are under 35, with the average age of the entries being 45. The list features just three women.

KSI, whose real name is Olajide Olatunji, is one of seven members of the Sidemen, a YouTube collective who make videos of challenges, sketches and video game commentary.

Another YouTube gamer on the list is PewDiePie, a Japan-based Swedish vlogger named Felix Kjellberg who has several companies in the UK. He takes the 25th spot with a fortune of £45m.

Dan and Sam Houser, co-founders of Rockstar Games, come in at fourth with a combined fortune of £350m and are best known for the Grand Theft Auto series of games.

Others in the top 10 include a trio of developers – Riccardo Zacconi, Mel Morris and Sebastian Knutsson – who created the mobile phone game Candy Crush. The game has been downloaded more than three billion times since it launched 12 years ago.

The duo who developed Minecraft for the Xbox, Paddy Burns and Chris van der Kuyl, tied in the 11th spot with £150m each.

More than a quarter of those on the list are aged under 35 with the average age being 45, and just three women make it on the list.

The only woman to feature in the top 10 was Wendy Irvin-Braben, of game developer Frontier Developments, who placed 10th with husband David with a joint worth of £175m.

In the 13th spot with £130m is Debbie Bestwick, former chief executive of Team17, which created cult classic Worms, kitchen simulator Overcooked and fishing game Dredge.

Tamsin O’Luanaigh, who founded virtual reality company nGames with her husband Patrick, comes in at 28th with a joint worth of £26m.

Robert Watts, compiler of the Sunday Times Gaming Rich List, said that making a fortune playing or making video games may sound like a “dream” for many young people, but the rich list “tells the rags-to-riches stories of people who have done exactly that.”