I can see from my analytics that the video is being picked up by the algorithm a bit. Hello to all the new people! I'm working on the script for my next video right now (taking a bit to come together, but its getting there).

ngl, companies need to stop making their games "competitive" and make a mechanically sound and fun game in the first place, the community will get competitive on its own anyway

A competitive scene isnt something you create, its something you support

Watching this 6 months after it was posted and listening to how OW 2 was seen as a success story is wild

My personal opinion is that ESports has bred generations of clip hungry, stat addicted, no personality players who only use that the “pros” or influencers use, nobody does their own thing anymore, like you said in the beginning, the announcers try to keep the lights on but nobody’s home, nobody but the top tiers

Shocked that StarCraft 1 and 2 weren't mentioned as a prime examples of games that got little support but maintained massive playerbases

I still find it fascinating that, with most fighting games, the beloved eSports scene was just like a byproduct of people loving the game. I think companies are failing to see that you can't just pump millions of dollars into 'competitive' eSports and watch it grow. the game has to be good first, and somewhat competitive by nature. Halo 5 and how they tried to push eSports with that game is like a perfect case study.

I treat it like this. I can show my grandfather a grand final match of street fighter and he can instantly recognize one person is getting his ass beat. I show him Overwatch and he has not a single clue of whats going on so he wants to turn to something else.

One thing I hate about "esport" games is how the companies starts to balance the game around "esports". While esports can be very popular regarding to the game, the esport players are the definition of a vocal minority. 200 players can be the voices of the entire game and its balance when there's literal millions of players who will hate the changes because it ruins the fun of the game.

I miss when games were made to be fun to play, and not made to be as competitive as possible.

I always thought the biggest issues were trying to force casual and hardcore into the same servers. I remember when OW came out, and the hardcore gamers screamed at every little non-meta thing you did, while the casuals would borderline throw matches with their Hanzo picks, not caring at all about what the outcome of the match was. Putting them together is an explosive combination.

I think Melee is such a gem in the eSports world. It wasn't meant to be competitive and it only became super competitive because people basically broke the game through insanely well-timed moves and turned it into something completely different. The community shaped it into something competitive.

The best way I've heard it put is "pros are supposed to be good at the game, not change the game so they can be good at it"

i was surprised when Blizzard announced their ambitious esports scene when Overwatch came out. I always thought that the competitive community of the game needed to grow and test out the game more during ranked seasons. Before that, making huge commercialized events out of the game was gonna be a huge gamble as the balancing issues and core gameplay problems started show. I personally feel it also affected the ranked experience negatively as people took the game too seriously.

Problem with esports that too many people think they are worth to be in it while being complete crap, or for that matter cheat and cry when they are busted.

I think that a major issue that most game companies miss these days is the fun factor. A lot of games these days focus so hard on being cutthroat competitive they forget that a game, at its core, must actually be fun to play.

I've been saying this for a lot of time. Esports is something that, if you develop a game focused on it, you will alienate the vast majority of casual players. Dooming it from the beginning, because if only the best players find it fun, you'll find yourself without an audience.

"You cannot force esports" Blizzard, after many failed attempts: That won't stop me cause i can't read!!

As a person who's played competitive games for awhile. I'm so damn tired of people forcing games to be competitive. Just make a fun game please and let the players decide what they wanna do with it

Reminds me of when some guy at 343 said Halo is a competitive shooter. Meanwhile fans always loved that it was a fun game to play with buddies. They saw the hype and money other shooters got from being an e-sport and decided the 20 year fan base wasn't important.

that comment about overwatch aged very well

My son loves these videos even more than breakfast, keep it up

HOTS was something I wish Blizz had let grow naturally instead of trying to force an Esport to make bank.

IMHO trying to force a competitive scene for a game always ends up making the game not fun to play

Nintendo makes such good competitive games that even when they are actively trying to shut down the esports scenes of their games they still have giant esports scenes

Esports needs to happen naturally because of the community not forced by the company

Team Fortress 2 is a perfect example how good a game can be if you are not worrying about competitive pro balance while creating it. The genius behind the concept of spy class is something competitive games can only dream of. I mean seriously, in what world could that be balanced for pro play? This things are why a 20 year old game is up and running with a living community while brand new games are dead after a month. That and hats i guess.

E-sport overfocus kills games. Like it or not, vast majority of players are not hypercompetitive people, many are not competitive at all and don't even touch multiplayer at all. So, if a company that made the game craves this competitive scene to be the face of the game, they effectively cater to a very tiny percentage of people at the expense of everyone else. You can often see this in patches - caring only about the very highest tip of the endgame content, nerfing and buffing based on strategies that only the very best of the players can use, making balance changes that ruin the fun. If you listen to only competitive scene, you will end-up either with just 1 winning strategy or you will end up with chess, eventually. Look at strategy games - why so many fail so miserably - you will find a massive common denominator - most of tried to be an e-sport, or at least tried to be the next StarCraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires 2 or Command and Conquer, maybe the next Supreme Commander - little to no innovation, or monstrous focus on multiplayer with every other aspect being and afterthought. You end up with games that may be mechanically sound but forget to be fun while at it.

Watching this video made me realize that I really want rhythm games to have a larger competitive scene as by design they can't be unbalanced (unless if they have characters for some reason but I can only think of like 2 games where that would be an issue).

I imagine there was no mention of DotA 2 because it is the paradox to everything stated here. -It is hard to understand, watch and high skill ceiling -It is unbalanced because if everything is broken then nothing is -The game itself has a modding community that allows you to play previous versions of the game with other people using the same servers - Community is passionate but toxic -More than a decade old

Overbalanced games are sterile

Mortal Kombat is a prime example of what a game that used to be fun but now is a victim of esports disaster that destroyed its product

I will say as a soulcalibur 2 nut; it’s actually a very balanced game. You constantly see the worst character hold his ground against the best character in the game played by multiple different people. It’s roster is simply balanced around 1. The strong defensive universal mechanics allowing everyone to prevent a steam roll and to approach, 2. Damage isn’t that high on average meaning there’s no easy way to steamroll or rob and invalidate the other players work up to that point, and 3. (For the most part) having a move that would on paper be bs for them to have, but because everyone sans yun-seoung has a contender for the best move in the game you have to respect what everyone brings to the table. These three things combined means anyone can play the game unlike 12 in 3s or king in t4 who just don’t play the same game as even the mid tiers because of how deficient they are, and that every character can be viable because the game doesn’t allow anyone to get obsoleted by other characters or prevent them from competing with what makes a character meta.

Not gonna lie it is kind of funny that they turned gaming into a sport.

As a lifelong gamer but now having more important prioritise like job, gym, girlfriend, etc... when I'm playing at the moment it's to chill out and I feel like there's a big hole in the market for casual games

You forgot to mention toxicity. Guilty Gear Strive is a very hard game, but I never raged from losing at online fights with it. The fights are fast, and I always feel like I learned something new from it. The opposing player can break you to pieces and still be nice to you.

This is the first time I agree with a KZfaqr that thinks some aspect of gaming is "dying". You truly exposed the problem, all of us who actually grew up playing counterstrike, halo ce, fear combat online etc, couldn't care less at the time for eSports as long as we were having fun, but today everything seems to be only successful if it's trending on some reddit trash hole by kids screaming for nerfs or buffs. Loved the vid man, keep it up!

I swear the second you brought up games with no dev support for competitive settings I immediately thought the smash community, glad to see you addressed it here, honestly very sad cause I play competitive smash to this day and wish Sakurai and his team supported it…

I'm watching you for the first time and I really like the Commentary channel OC expressions but executed in a model with texture shaders in a more 3D enviorement. It looks so detailed but yet also so simple that it works beautifully

This was a great video! One thing i also think is really important is basically all games with a big e-sports scene didn't design their game with the thought in mind that it's gonna be a big e-sports thing, they just made a really fun and deep game. Tekken, street fighter, smash, cs:go, fortnite, rocket league, league of legends etc. all got such big competitive scenes cause they built up big fanbases by being fun games with very high skill ceilings. On the flipside you have games specifically designed to be an e-sport (halo 5, dead or alive 6), and most of those just never catch on, cause there just isn't the fun factor and creativity of the others

Spot on about the community aspect. Look at speed running. No teams, no sponsors, no million dollar prize pools yet some of the most dedicated people I’ve ever seen and a whole chunk of them speedrun for charity in things like Games Done Quick too. These companies always want the short cut to the big payoffs but they don’t want to put in the work and players see through that and drop em like a rock.

esports as a concept are the lamest thing ever. you're not even having fun, you straight up dedicate your life to a single videogame

God shivers when the youtuber animated mascot crosses their arms

I miss when videogames were just about having fun. It honestly feels like most people treat them as a job now, and company-made E-sports is the perfect manifestation of that.

Blizzard murdered their first new IP in a decade desperately trying to make it an esport. And they failed. They saw that there was a popular game and thought "how can we make more money out of this?"

With overwatch it doesn’t help that people are actively punished for teaming up, with longer que times and lower match quality as consequence. Meaning that the concept of teaming up with others and discussing strategy, something the esport version relies on, is completely foreign to the regular player. If they ever manage to fix it, i’m sure the esport side will see considerable growth

The main issue in my opinion is that the fixes needed by competitive players and casual players usually are complete opposites, because they don't play the same way. But game devs appeal to the smaller, comp community even though they play a different game from the causal audience and usually fix their own problems anyway. Like with 6s in TF2.

That's why TF2 is the ultimate shotter that NEVER dies Edit: *I created a fearsome war...*

The overwatch example was terrible. While stuns getting removed was good, two tanks was better than currently and the game is only successful because of its transition to being free to play. A large portion of the old community left because the game is worse. And a lot of the core issues still haven’t been addressed. That’s why the overwatch league is shutting down. Because the game has overall lost popularity and integrity. Going to 1 tank instead of 2 wasn’t a solution. It was sweeping a problem under a rug, inevitably leading to a much much larger issue.

My issue is that a lot of studios focus on making their games for esports and seem to ignore making it fun to play.

TLDR: I think this can all be summed up by saying. MAKE the game fun and easy to play and understand. And you may find eSports success, but don't focus on that or you'll fail on the fundamental promise of the game.

I think that your point of how the community has to drive it is really well put. in team fortress 2 the tiny competitive scene there is entirely run by the community, everything from playing matching and joining a team to getting commentators. It's all just the community coming together for the love of the game

I don't like the term "esport" anyway. It's a video game competition. It's not a sport and the people who play them aren't athletes.

watching someone playing videogames as if you were watching a sports match or a movie is just cringe tbh.

my favorite esport example of all time has always been melee, but fan made inspirations of that game such as Prpject Plus and Rivals of aether been left into the wayside to other more modern takes of the genre... brawlhalla and smash ultimate being more popular in the esport showcase then these games ever will be.

Yet another great video dude. I think your point on the game having balanced mechanics is definitely the most important one, because if the game isn't fun to play casually, how is it supposed to be fun competitively? I think it goes to show fun should be prioritized first over any other kind of meandering thing that is just there to get a game more attention. It's how a 30 year old busted Sailor Moon fighting game can have an active fanbase and tournaments while many battle royales and shooters have a hard time staying in public conscious for more than a week

As a game designer, I mostly agree with this, but I think that the final conclusion with the whole balance thing is slightly wrong. Mechanics don't need to be balanced either, the only reason they seem to be a bigger problem than characters is that it's far more difficult to circumvent poorly designed core mechanics than selectable characters, weapons or stages. It's okay for a game to be extremely unbalanced, what's not okay is making it boring. What balance (or lack thereof) do is make players gravitate towards optimal strategies. The problem arises when these optimal strategies are repetitive and boring. Balance doesn't make a game less boring, but bad balance can eclipse all fun ways to play a game in favor of boring broken strategies. In conclusion, you don't want your competitive game to be balanced, you want to make sure that the way it's unbalanced is actually fun and has enough variety to sustain a community. The more balanced a game is the more boring it actually becomes.

Being a Gamer from Day 1, i started to dislike online gaming when "competetive" and esports began to rise. I saw this of the end of having fun in a game and the entrance for sweats and tryhards. I think i finally stepped away when Overwatch went in this direction and people proudly claimed to "main" any characters in a game that IMO could profit by changing the roles during gameplay. I do not believe i have the final wisdom, its just a personal experience. There is a strong demand for people to proof themselves and to show of their skills and i don't look down on people playing those games. But i had the most fun in Battlefield 2 when the gameplay was slower and it felt more strategical and tactical versus the new Versions with less and less of that exchanged with fast chaotic gameplay. It is what it is, have fun, be nice and don't take everything so serious. But kids need to understand that careers in "Pro Gaming" are very short and you should be prepared for a live after.

Age of Empires 2 went through years of literally no devs and hun wars with its high level competitive scene basically being funded by very rich fans who just wanted to watch some players be really good at the game and its "regular" competitive being completely on a community site. Pretty much a testament to everything you said, even if things are much different now or if the game isn't as hot as things like LoL and CS.

I think the most important point is, community, you cannot artificially create one, and that is the problem, like OW, just one year later and there was a league when hardly people were gathering togheter to create a scene, at the end we got just employees not players playing for companies not teams, and when you cater to these people who their 9 to 5 is playing the game, you will end up balancing the game in a matter that doesn't apply well to the average player which bitters them and end up killing a real scene.

I don't think "love and passion" should be used for OW2, game is as stale as bread

The other problem is when game developers or their studios shut down 3rd party fan created content or servers for older versions of their games. For a while there was a small independent team working on creating an "old school league of legends server" that would let people play the game in the way that they originally fell in love with it. But Riot Games went after them and sadly the project (that people had already spent thousands of hours working on) was axed. And while Riot Games had a right to prevent others from profiting off of their work, the fan-made servers were going to be free, but beyond that there was such a passionate group of fans supporting the project that Riot made a huge mistake in not deciding to partner with the project. Another more recent example were the fan made and free OG Call of Duty servers, where one could play COD4, WAW, MW2, and BO1. All people wanted was a way to play their favorite games back from a time before skill based matchmaking, bad netcode, bad connections, and other myriad issues began to suck the fun out of their beloved series. But instead of officially supporting the project, and basically having all the work done for them by the community, Activision torpedoed the whole thing. Incurring even more disdain and hatred from the community who just wanted to play the games that they loved, *and had previously paid for!!!*

I am also tired of the forced E-sports trend.

I'd replace "mechanically balanced" with "mechanically interesting". Aside from how people love the game despite rage mechanic existing, Tekken 7 backdashing would also be considered degenerate in any other game, but it ends up still being interesting because it creates a tense game where every attack is meaningful when it does happen.

Trackmania's Grand League tournaments is a good example of a healthy and non-toxic eSport. Its easy to watch and understand from a glance, the maps are always new and interesting, the developers support it and the community hypes it in a good way. Race results only depend you each player's skills, since the cars dont collide with each other, even though they play on the same map/server. This means there can be little to no hard feelings towards other players, since they dont affect your own performance.

You can tell this video is old when he’s talking about Overwatch 2 in a positive light

Overwatch 2 hasn't gotten larger because of changing the balance of the game or stun or tank meta, it got larger because it no longer costs $40 to play and because they upped advertising campaign budgets like they had in OW 1's release year.

I want to say that I really like this essay. My favorite esport is CSGO because its simple, super hype, and super tense to watch. It also provides a direct counter example to all three incorrect points you identified in the first half. I want to say that your third point sounds less like the game balance needs to be good, and more that the game itself needs to be fun to play. Maybe that's just my bias speaking though.

Nah, what’s killing the gaming scene is competitive play. You can make a fun game competitive, you can’t make a competitive game fun.

You somehow completely ignored the original competitive esport: Quake.

I think one of the most interesting competitive games out there is classic NES Tetris. You have a game that wasn't even designed to be played in multiplayer to begin with, yet it has *monthly* tournaments. Just goes to show how much the community behind it matters.

Dota2 had the biggest prize pool in history at 40 million, not Fortnite.

good analysis! i def think the esports craze is a big reason as to why many recent multiplayer games have been lackluster. devs are putting the cart before the horse trying to create an esports scene rather than a game.

I really don't care about esports. It's had another effect on the gaming industry that I don't care for. Games are now being played for fulfillment instead of fun. Now, every game needs to be made hard to garner respect, which in turn makes them less entertaining to play and have fun with. I really don't get the obsession with frustration in place of entertainment. I don't play games to be angry, and I'm getting sick of that being the norm.

The mod community is who will keep retro games alive. There will always be a dedicated fan with the skill to make something from the past that everyone loved. I agreed with everything in this video though.

ngl overwatch losing a tank is killing the game.

Even the game Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, popular in the South-East Asia, starting to get boring, without trash talks (no bullshiting each other) and spicy banters between players in its community. For me, if the developers recognize players who are playing the game within years, that will be exciting!

I don't think an Esport has to be easy to understand and watch to someone who hasn't played it. Both LoL and Dota 2 are incomprehendable to someone who hasn't put hundreds of hours into the game. The key distinction is that the knowledgeable viewer needs to be able to understand what is going on at all times in the game, what each player is doing, and how each player is reacting to it. BRs have this issue where the viewer is never able to get a macro idea of the entire map, as they can only focus on one area at a time (BR games also have issues with RNG but that's a different topic). Similarly in OW, you can't really see what all 10 players are doing at one time and it just turns into a clusterfuck of particles and ultimates. This is probably an issue with the camera being in 3rd person, or can only focus on 1 player at a time. In Dota, however, each ability is very distinct and you can usually process what is going on in real-time. Additionally there's often 1 or 2 ultimates that you want to focus on (Black Hole, Echo Slam), and you wait and see what impact those have on the fight. There's also significant downtime in-between fights so that casters can replay fights and talk about what was going on. Occasionally fights are really hard to follow and chaotic (such as "The Play") but often these fights highlight the players skills and are extremely exciting to watch in real time.

The biggest problem with esports is that we stop caring about the game and start caring about the competition itself. That is why so many fighting games lives on competitively, the players and organizers want to watch and enjoy the game and their way of doing it happens to be by competing and sharing that. Esports like overwatch become so much about winning that you can't really enjoy the game but hate all of the issues with it that you see as obstactles for that goal

It's honestly shocking how someone can manage to talk for 15 minutes about Esports and not mention Starcraft. Both the original Starcraft and Starcraft 2 still have active large Global tournaments to this day. They have some of the best announcers that are fantastic at making you understand the game even if you've literally never seen it before, and it has ZERO dev support blizzard abandoned those games long ago

If I could mention another video that has a lot of significance, it'd be FoldingIdea's video on WoW. In it he discusses the idea of "instrumental" play. It means that when playing a videogame, there are certain groups that will push that game to it's limit. In pve games it's min-maxing and efficiency of play. The problem is that these groups gain popularity and gain audiences that mimic their strategies. This creates a gaming environment that forces new players to follow the popular strats or else they're "playing wrong". This in turn convinces the playerbase that there is only one real way to play, the way that is most competitive. In pvp games this idea is enforced by the developers as well, which creates a population that will flame the shit out of you unless you're playing they best way.

this was certainly an algorithm win for me. very nuanced and extremely good take (especially with mentioning the live service games that can just disappear with no way for anyone to re-access them)

When i was 12 and saw csgo clips, I wanted to become an esport player, now 4yrs later, I just wanna build my house in Minecraft peacefully

To pulling together some of your later points and adding a bit, I would say a successful esports also have to feel satisfying to win, and the outcome of the match needs to reflect the true (or as close as possible) mental and mechanical skill of each player (as few flukes as possible). People have to like the game inside and out (mechanics, format, and content) to want to play it for a really long time, and continuing dev support can only help (or hurt) it to a certain degree. Over a game's lifespan, especially in the case of longtime esports (Smash Melee in particular) with no dev support, new things are discovered, and the way the game is thought of and played changes too. And above all, it needs to be fun to watch, from how approachable the game is to understand, how easy it is to physically watch what is happening, to the storylines that develop between competitors.

Balancing is what killed Valorant for me. Because every character was shit at one point. They nerfed utility so hard that I’m the end it felt so steril

I've never been competitively inclined. I just wanted to have fun with friends.

First a very good fighting game analysis video and now this? My man you gonna be BIG if you keep it up like this

Totally agree. Gaming has been corporate for decades now, but the past 10ish years have felt far worse (even more corporate) for AAA games.

This is what i find unique about Valve games like Dota, CS:GO, and TF2. All of these games are so simple in its core yet so hard to master and thats what makes them both a fun casual experience and a Esports tournament game

Evo moment 37 is humanity's peak of competitive match

Yes, lets just ignore the fact that OW2 has been bleeding players since its launch, with most those players either going back to TF2 & LoL or moving to games like Valorant. This isnt to disprove your point about OW2's relatively healthier meta, its just that minor detail was bugging the hell out of me. Activision Blizzard is a dumpster fire of a company, we could be using a better example than Overwatch.

Team Fortress 2 still remains my favorite "competitive" game to this day, even though I last played it competitively in 2018 TF2 has always been a casual game, throwing out things like balanced weapons, combinations and meta play out the door to create a game where you could have 5 people play Rock, Paper, Scissors in some random corner of the map while the rest of the teams try to outfight each other with bows, guns, Heavies running around with gloves that give you critical hits with every kill. Random bullshit like this. Very fun and enjoyable bullshit. Just pure, nonsense enjoyment where everyone found a way to have fun, one way or another. But the game itself ends up having an extremely high skill ceiling and people picked up on that and started their own 2 formats of competitive play and found their own competitive leagues where people would make teams, organize scrims and go on tournaments with small prices and they did it just for the fun of being competitive in a game they loved. And the reason why this is such a big deal, is because the competitive players found a way to reformat the game for their own competitive play and had their completely separate servers where they could practice or play scrims. The casual side of things was completely unaffected by this. The competitive leagues were made by the community that cared about competitive. Now, each game is trying to be competitive but realize that a small percentage of the community actually cares about the game as an eSport and simply want to play the game for what it is and now every single game has your broken rank systems, smurfs, constant changes of the game because metas are shifting and you can never have your own favorite thing stay the way you liked it, reworks. One weapon is deemed broken, so it's nerfed. But then people go to something else and then THAT weapon is broken and needs to be nerfed. The previously underrated characters somehow became OP without any changes, since someone in the eSport scene said something about the character or did something with it. And now you pit the really sweaty people who treat the game like their upcoming eSports career against the people that just want to hop in and play the game to the best of their abilities or try something new. The sweaty players bitch and moan about shitty teammates that don't treat the game the same way they do and the casual players are driven out of the community, because they can't have their own casual environment to JUST HAVE FUN and are constantly curb-stomped. Skill-based matchmaking never works due to smurfs and the difficulty of making a good skill-based matchmaker and even when it's good, it is still flawed because then everything becomes perfect, flat balance where nothing interesting happens. You play the game to get better, only to perform the same because everyone else is constantly at your level and you never get a properly good game where you can see the progress you've done. There is no option for them. And I know that people will say "Just go play Quick Match/Casual modes", but those casual modes are nothing. It's the same, competitive format, with the same balancing and the same metas as competitive, except ranks are not counted anymore and the gamerules might change. It's diluted competitive, not casual. And the only reason all of these problems I said above exist, is because every single PVP multiplayer game nowadays seems to aim to be the next Counter-Strike or R6 Siege or League of Legends.

9:08 - “eSports for the most part is not a very profitable industry” 🙀

Sometimes, there's a choice of Counter-Picking. This means if someone picks a broken character/weapon, the opponent has a chance of doing something else (which may not even be meta) to entirely counter the broken character/weapon.

This makes me wonder how the fuck the Yugioh competitive scene has maintained any sort of stability. Games aren't very easy to follow in the modern day, the only people watching live broadcasts of YCS coverage are just people who already play the game, and there's a shit ton of unclear rulings that you often wouldn't know unless a judge told you. It breaks all the rules of your criteria, and yet Master Duel completely popped off and started getting new people into the game. Granted, it also pointed a light on a lot of the issues with the modern game, but its still pretty enjoyable to play despite these issues. I guess its just the appeal of being able to express yourself through your deck list assuming you're not net-decking.

The main game I got to watch die from Esports obsession was Hawken. They over-promised that game super hard from the start. Claiming it would have a hundred million concurrent players, and be the next big Esport phenomenon on par with League of Legends. This got them massive sponsorships from companies like Nvidia and Alienware. But, because all they had was a small, relatively low skill team to work with, they never managed to pull it off. The main game mode the wanted to be competitive, Siege, was never properly balanced. No matter what they changed, it always either ended up being a one sided slaughter, or an endless stalemate. So it was boring to play, and would have been boring to watch. Eventually, they had to pay back their debts, and couldn't. So what could have been a really fun casual F2P shooter with a small, but very dedicated fanbase, died. Simply because they dug too deep a hole for themselves, and couldn't manage to climb back out.

I have a personal pet peeve with Esports ebcause they are, in many ways, responsible for the death of the Real Time Strategy game. After starcraft 1 and 2 got incredibly popular as esports, especially in S. korea, the other big RTS series, especially Command & Conquer, chased this to their own detriment. C&C3: Red Alert was shoved into being an Esport and was good in spite of it, and the much Maligned C&C:4 was originally meant to be a Mobile Esport-like game for the Chinese market that got shoved into a box and sold as C&C:4. The attempts at sequels after rhat, like the Ill-fated Generals 2 suffered from being shoved into an Esports angle as well. Especially since they shaved off it’s more edgy angles because of it.

Not every game needs an esports okay? Let that sink in

To me Overwatch is the definitive example of a game that was ruined by its obsession with eSports. As someone who’s never been a fan of competitive games or first-person shooters, I really enjoyed Overwatch at launch for the world, characters, and easy to learn but hard to master gameplay. But every time the competitive community whined about something, Blizzard completely changed the game at the expense of what made the game fun for casual players like me. First there was no more picking duplicate characters, which was mostly fine. But then you couldn’t even play whatever role you wanted and DPS players were forced into extreme load times. Now there isn’t even the fun 6-person teams that I thought made such a fun balance. Everything feels so regimented now, like you can’t play the way you want to. I wish they just focused instead on what made me fall in love with the game in the first place: the world and characters. I was always far more excited for a new animated short than a new balance patch, and I don’t think I was alone.

I never understood people watching others play video games and people attending an E-Sports turnament are just the pinacle of ridiculousness.