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The only game I really see viable as a true nationally broadcast e-sport is counter-strike. Dead simple concept, intuitive mechanics even to laypeople, and the meta game can be explained in 10 minutes.

Maybe besides COD, everything else is too complex and requires to much prerequisite knowledge to really get into. I could probably get my dad to watch counter-strike. He would probably wouldn't go for valorent. Almost certainly not something like overwatch. And definitely would never watch something like league or dota.

Sure, there is money in e-sports catering to the communities that form around the games, but I think for most games they'll never reach outside their player community.

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> Dead simple concept, intuitive mechanics even to laypeople, and the meta game can be explained in 10 minutes.

Do you feel like this applies to American Football? I don't, but yet it's the most popular sport on TV in America.

What I'm saying is that I don't think your requirements are necessary for a sport to be a popular spectator sport.

American Football is extremely simple game relative to other games. It also is piece-wise fast paced. The game goes really fast, then gets a small break. it lends it self easily to television broadcast with its timeouts, changing of sides, etc. I am not of fan of american football, but I can see how it became popular.

"Do you feel like this applies to American Football?"

Honestly, yes. Protestations that it's too difficult to understand seems to me to stem from people who literally want the game explained in three seconds or less.

The core is simple. Team have ball. Team want move ball that way for points. Other team want stop them. Work out the legal ways for them to score points and move ball around as you go. The super detailed lacunae of what penalties are for what exist in all sports, it just isn't generally noticed. The FIFA rules for soccer run 144 pages: https://www.amazon.com/Official-Rules-Soccer-U-S-Federation/... Not a huge book, probably not huge pages, but a great deal more detailed than you'd try to "explain" to someone just learning what soccer is.

Most of the meta around passing plays versus running plays can be explained easily.

It really isn't that complicated.

To the extent that it is, all the sports are. At the top end everything gets complicated, hence, Moneyball and that sort of thing. Basketball is a simple sport of putting the ball in the hoop while dribbling it, but at the top end you start talking about matchups between this guy and that guy and how being 3% better at three-point shots affects this team's matchups against that team... but that's not something you have to care about to watch it, any more than you have to care about what the name of every position is in every sport initially.

But you could say the same for most video games: Here is the object. Team shoots their way through until they accomplish the object. The rest is just arcane knowledge of experts.

I disagree here. I've watched professional sports a fair bit in my life, and I've watched eSports (and played their respective games) a bunch, and from my experience eSports are far more difficult to pick up.

To try and give a reason others haven't really mentioned, professional sports tend to have predictable camera angles and pacing, making it easier to get a complete picture of who is doing what and when. In eSports, the arenas are typically strategically complex, requiring similarly complex camera angles, making it difficult to get a sense of what's going on at any point in time.

> In eSports, the arenas are typically strategically complex

I think that is a key point. In most sports the arenas are quite simple. Most ball sports have some rectangle and you can judge intuitively whether a team is likely in a better position than another. And even in marathon or triathlon or such the course itself may be complex, but you can reduce it to "X meters till finish line" and "athlete A is in front of B" to get a good enough understanding on the situation.

Of course all sports allow for some amount of tactics, when to play a bit more passive, when to attack, ... but you don't need those for some basic experience while watching.

In eSports the arena is complex and hard to preceive, the physics aren't exact as we all know them, the virtual equipment (weapons, boosters, ...) are unknowns.

And then eSports typically are quick, which makes learning hard.

For newer class-based games like Overwatch, the classes behave so differently and exuberantly that people are going to want to know what ever new flashy effect means. In football, the "classes" blend together and share a common goal. The difference between the Offensive Guard and Offensive Tackle are minuscule to the layperson. However the difference between Reinhardt and Winston are huge, both in terms of playstyle and presentation. Compound this with games adding new classes sometimes as frequently as every three months. That's hard to keep up for the casual viewer.

However you are correct that the objectives in games are usually simple. Push this thing from here to there. Don't let enemy stand here alone. Shoot enemy until no enemy.

You could trivialize any sport/game down into 3 simple sentences. The problem is that in American football, there really is only 2 type of players that have different rules: QB, and non-QB. Maybe kicker. Same with soccer too, goalie and non-goalie.

In League, there's (at the time of this writing) 140 players (champs) that each have different rules and capabilities assigned to them, because they have different abilities and are used differently strategically. Top/mid/bottom/jungle really doesn't matter much more than player placements like tight-end, offensive tackle, howver.

Counter-Strike has 1 character type, 2 teams, and is so simple to explain. I can explain counter-strike to my mom in one sentence. The places where one should get anxious or excited are immediately obvious to a layperson. Explaining the goal of league is easy, however I'd struggle to explain enough of league to my mom so that she can understand why she should be excited when one specific champ is getting fed, or why the enemy team should be careful about clustering, because of a unique situation in this one specific match that is not always going applicable to a different match.

I'd probably be done explaining a handful of characters by the time the match is over, and she'd forget within 10 minutes. I know this because I've been trying to explain Pokemon since the 90s. She 100% understands football and baseball, however.

"But you could say the same for most video games:"

For games that involve shooting at people, I'd agree. A particular first-person perspective may be difficult to follow but the core is simple and you can pick up the pieces as you go. Quake deathmatches have a lot of interesting arcana to dig into if you want to play at top level, but you can just watch one without any particular skill. From there you can incrementally pick up that shooting someone before the player even saw them is impressive, or that identifying, acquiring, and plinking them with a rail gun in <500ms is pretty impressive. The speed of these things might be inaccessible, but it's not the rule set that is.

Most things have a novice-level entry ramp. My sons seemed to pick up the basics of American Football in about 5 minutes when they were 8. It really isn't that hard. They didn't encounter their first "safety" until quite a while later, for instance, but their lack of knowledge of what a safety is didn't bother them. I've been watching for a lot longer and still couldn't simply whip off the names of all the positions or anything myself.

Not all esports have that, though. I can say from personal experience though that DOTA is impenetrable if you don't know what's going on. I've been at a local restaurant that was playing some matches for whatever reason. I know about video games in general but know nothing about DOTA. I suppose you could say I understood what it was I didn't understand, but I had no idea who was winning, what a good play was, etc.

I mean, at least with real life sports there are no hacky obtuse contrivances because, it's real life, not a videogame with a meta that includes knowledge of engine exploits or intimate knowledge of map geometry. Someone pixel-aligning themselves to throw a blind smoke that bounces off of invisible above-the-map geometry to eliminate a sightline or someone blind firing though a wall-bang because they've counted the seconds since round start and judge someone might be there is obtuse to anyone onlooking via a stream. In football, or golf, or soccer, all the elements of play can be observed all at once without multiple angles needed to explain what's happening.

The difference lies in the fact that a really popular spectator sport mostly comes from a game people have already played at some point or could naturally conceive of(e.g. auto racing as an extension of driving, MMA as an extension of street brawls), and therefore don't need explanations for. Although Counter-Strike has a huge legacy among video games, it hasn't entered the school curriculum like baseball/basketball/football AFAIK, and it's only loosely related to a kind of live combat scenario that few people witness in person.

There's a step-function there where if a major educational institution started pushing a video game, it'd have the awareness to be a sport. But they don't, so the path forward is tied to the whims of the market.

It may work out that the 20th century pro sports model is just not going to be part of this. That model came from an era combining fast travel, broadcast media, and a small number of large sponsors. At first it was teams who travelled by rail and had their games casted over radio. Later, jet planes and TV. But nowadays, with the streaming model, it's diffused to being able to watch live speedrun attempts, an activity which can resemble watching paint dry at times, but which does bring in some income within a long-tail niche audience.

Esport is on the curriculum in some schools in Denmark. Mainly continuation schools (efterskoler) or certain high schools. I guess how it turns out is going to be an interesting experiment.

Not to entirely disagree with you, but comparing football to Counter Strike is kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison - you're comparing an introduction to something new with something that most American viewers have probably known for their entire lives, so that factor of "explainability" doesn't exactly apply to it.

Eh, I'm not American and I found American football pretty straightforward, at least until you start looking at the play-calling and formations and all of that.

And you could say the same about CS, your market is probably "anyone who has played a first-person shooter"

As someone who has worked for several European companies try explaining american football scoring to a non-american and let me know how easy that is. That's basically just scratching the surface of it.

Saying you can boil it down to one side moves a ball the other side tries to stop them is pretty disingenuous. You can boil down basically any game to that. Counter strike you just kill the other team, mobas you just destroy the other teams base, etc. I know you didn't make that point but that's what most of the arguments in this thread are.

The difference: I have an intuitive understanding how hard it is to catch a football if a bunch of people runs towards me. Even if I never touched a football in my life. I have no intuition on what the eSports player can and can not do with their controls and the physics engine.

Cricket would be an alternative example that most Americans don't already understand

Football is dead simple, even simpler than CS: One team wants to go one way with the ball, the other wants to stop them, drive them back or, ideally, get the ball away from them and go the other way. They get four tries to go at least 10 yards and if they don't the other team gets the ball. If they make the 10 yards, they get another 4 tries.

There are a lot of fiddly details in offsides rules, incomplete passes, extra points, etc. but they aren't necessary to understand and enjoy watching a game.

You can even simplify even more. "They have to cross the line" instead of discussing 10 yards. And as humans have a rough understanding of the world we are in, even somebody with no prior knowledge of football can understand how complicated it can be to catch the ball. Input to eSports, which buttons there were to press at which time and how the game's physics model would react isn't as intuitive.

> They get four tries to go at least 10 yards and if they don't the other team gets the ball. If they make the 10 yards, they get another 4 tries.

Born and raised in America, I never knew this. First time I've seen it explained this way.

To my mind, Football is overly complicated, with crap tons of breaks, weird jargon, and a countdown clock that apparently means nothing.

Well, yes ?

Try to get to the end zone, if you do you score 6 points. You have 4 attempts to move forward 10 yards, if you don't, the ball goes to the other team. If you have more points, you win.

That's it, that's all you need to know to watch it and enjoy it. Sure, there's more ways of scoring and the details of each position, the routes they are running and play-calling in general is interesting, but it's not needed to just watch the game.

Ok but you can say the same about Counterstrike. The object is to diffuse the bomb. You shoot your way through the enemy until the bomb is diffused. The rest is just details for experts.

Which is why OP said CS is the game most likely to become popular. It's the simplest/most realistic esport.

> The object is to diffuse the bomb

I assume in this scenario the terrorist team is trying to plant and detonate the bomb, thereby diffusing its (perhaps damaging, poisonous, or radioactive) components over a wide area, while the counter-terrorist team is trying to defuse the bomb and prevent it from exploding in the first place.

The thing about computer games that I think will put off most people is that they exist in a custom reality.

In regular sports people can rely on their intuition to know what can and can't happen, to some degree. No football player is going to start flashing yellow while taking off down the field. A lot of video games are packed to the brim with custom physics and mechanics. No solid intuition, you really just have to learn them.

CS benefits from more or less functioning exactly how even a 75 year old lady would expect it to. A sniper is a sniper. A pistol a pistol. An assault rifle is an assault rifle. Bullets kill quick, and bombs go boom.

I think the biggest argument against the idea of CS becoming a household sport like football is the fact that, today, nobody bothers to watch competitive paintball. The fact that it's a simulation means it can do things you can't do in real life, sure, but it also means that it's harder to care about what's actually happening. In a real sport, you watch the players. In an esport, you watch avatars. People don't empathize with avatars nearly as much as they do with flesh-and-blood humans, at least not today.

What? CSGO is the most watched esport in the world. Paintball analogy, what?

The difference with American Football is although there have been subtle changes in the rules, it has been mostly the same for over 50 years. With esports (like in the case of Overwatch) they do not have that lifespan. So unless you are someone who is currently playing that game, you don't know how it works really. And if you were someone once playing that game 5 years ago, as in the case of Overwatch 1, they literally shut it off and it can't be played anymore.

The other difference is that American culture lives and breathes football, right from pee-wee to middle and high school, to the state college team level.

It's easier to build a multi billion dollar business around something people have been exposed to since birth.

Most commenters here also dont realize that American football is completely irrelevant outside of USA.

Most other countries dont know the sport, apart from maybe Commonwealth who play rugby at schools.

American football to me sounds very messy and extremely overly complicated? Like sometimes they throw, sometimes they kick, there is some goal but not goal thing. And stopping all the time? Like why not immediately get up and start running away? Or just dripple the ball all the way across the field? What is the point anyway?

Both teams work within the same constraints with the goal of beating the other. Same as any other sport.

They stop after a play because that’s part of the rules of the game.

You could probably find a video or article and understand all this in a few minutes. You have four attempts (downs) to move the ball 10 yards or you lose possession. Nearly everything else makes sense with that context.

>Do you feel like this applies to American Football?

As someone that grew up in the US and watching it with family, no, it's not the same. What is the same is watching Cricket. It probably has an even larger viewing audience than American Football in the US. As someone that has grown up with it, and they will start spewing rules at you that might as well be spoken in Klingon for the sense they make, but are perfectly understood by those that grew up with it. To be fair, reversing the conversation for me to explain rules to them is met with looks like I have 2 heads.

Video games are similar. I grew up in the "golden age" of home console games starting with Atari 2600, NES, and through today. However, I still spent time doing other things other than games. So to me, sitting around watching other people play video games is a non-starter. Maybe if I was at a bar and it was on the screen, but usually I just find a different screen. For people that are younger that don't have memories of playing outside and only know "playing" involving a computer device of some sort, then this seems perfectly reasonable that's what they'd rather watch.

just curious, how old are you that you think current youth have no memories of playing outside? what an amusing and out of touch statement, have you been outside in the past decade? Maybe not in a populated area because I see kids playing outside basically everyday. I also don't believe that you've never watched someone play a game, you didn't have siblings or friends growing up?

American football in 20 seconds: You have 4 opportunities to advance the ball a cumulative 10 yards, upon doing so, your 4 opportunities reset. Advance past the goal line = 6 points + opportunity for 1 additional. Fail to move 10 yards? Ball possession transfers to opponent. If it's 4th down (final opportunity) you can hedge -- punt the ball (transfer possession, but about 40 yards further away) or attempt a field goal (place kick through yellow uprights), which is worth 3 points.

Obviously there are nuances but that's 90% of it right there, in a lot less than 10 minutes.

American Football watchers grow up watching American Football.

Compared to that number, nobody grows up watching Dota.

As a longtime FPS player one area of complexity that is easy to forget is the maps.

When I play the game, I can learn a new map pretty quickly.

When I watch a game played on a map I'm not familiar with, it takes me much, much longer to develop the same understanding. It doesn't load into memory the same way. Similar to remembering the route to a new location as a passenger vs a driver.

The broadcast might flip back and forth between two players, hunting for each other in different parts of the map, and unless I know it pretty well I could be totally lost until they actually meet.

The broadcaster can help by using third person / freecam. But at the same time, an FPS loses a lot of the tension and visible skill when combat is viewed from freecam. So finding the right balance of camera time between individual players' views and an overhead view is challenging for a broadcaster, far more so than in traditional sports where we're accustomed to seeing a wide open field and perhaps some tracking of the ball.

Edit:

To give a practical example, I used to dabble in Quake Live. I was never any good, but there are some maps I know well: dm6, ztn, dm13, t7. Even though I'm not a big eSports fan, I don't watch streamers or whatever, I've seen some VODs played on those maps that really held my attention with suspense. I've been surprised at how entertaining it was watching top players duel.

At some point I watched a Quake Champions duel match between Rapha and Cooller and while the gameplay was quite familiar, not knowing the maps made it far less entertaining. I just couldn't follow the significance of the player's positioning nearly as well. Before that I totally underrated how much my familiarity with the maps was adding to my enjoyment of the Quake Live tournaments.

I've never gotten into FPS eSports for this reason. To me, Starcraft is the perfect eSport - imperfect knowledge for the players. Perfect knowledge for the casters and viewers. It's a great moment when someone tries to hide something on the map, and it _almost_ gets scouted. Or to see a reaction in the player-cam when they discover what their opponent is doing.

I've played thousands of hours of Overwatch in the past few years, but have 0 interest in watching OWL.

This is genuinely the biggest barrier to a new viewer of CS. Until you physically play on a map, it is very hard to understand by watching alone, especially as the perspectives are largely first-person. It can take dozens of hours to build a proper mental model of a map so understanding the game as camera angles change in a flurry is very difficult.

Traditional sports all have the same (or routinely similar) "map", and they're mostly made up of a simple geometric shape that can generally fit in a single overhead frame.

Not Rocket League? The inverse may be true... I became a rocket league player after watching esports. So while I was outside the player base, I'm in it now. :)

Yeah, rocket league too. I didn't think of it. Although I'm iffy on anything with non-reality physics, since people have to learn a new intuition.

Dota is kind of fun to watch even if you're not that well-educated, but the announcing/casting style needs a serious overhaul, and general popularity needs a lot of "support" from good production: information overlays, slow-motion replays, giving casters the ability to zoom out to a full-map view and draw arrows, etc.

Look at hockey, American football, and road cycling for examples of complicated sports that are somewhat hard to understand without prior knowledge, and people really enjoy watching those, too.

At one time DotA2 had a noob friendly stream that would explain what was going on in greater detail, but it's a hard balancing act. DotA2 allows in game spectating which actually means you can click in items to figure out what they do. It would be cool if streaming platforms had embedded item and hero information for users to be able to expand on demand.

Complexity is something that affects League and DotA2. It's hard to know what all the things on screen even mean, and why they're important.

> It would be cool if streaming platforms had embedded item and hero information for users to be able to expand on demand.

Twitch actually has this for Dota now! On bigger streams, you can click on the spells and items to see the tooltip.

Maybe I'm too conservative but I don't think Counter-strike or fps in general could make on a wide broadcast. (It still people killing other people) We would have more chance on politically acceptable game like (Trackmania, Rocket League, ...) but they have smaller audience in general.

It is a real shame that Ubisoft Nadeo hasn't really marketed Trackmania outside of Europe (they mostly focus on just France). Streamers have been driving a ton of growth in the game (particularly in the US) because it is so intuitive and enjoyable to watch.

Unfortunately the competitive scene has quite a bit of catching up to do as it is still very France and Germany centric. They are making strides to do that with the new world tour but it is going to take awhile before some new players get up to the level of the primarily European professional base.

During the pandemic real reacecar drivers turned to the e-version of their sports and there was even some coverage of mainstream racing channels of those virtual races given they couldn't do the real thing.

For anyone who has tried virtual racing (especially with high-end setups), the level of authenticity of the experience is actually incredibly high, and racing simulation is even actively used as part of real life driver training and car development. I think there's a healthy community in virtual racing as is and I can easily see continued and growing investment in it... its an incredibly compelling way to bring people into the sport and can easily be a revenue generator in its own right.

I still think drivers should remotely pilot cars with about half the mass of the current ones that wouldn't be designed around protecting an occupant. They could go 300+ mph and show us a new frontier in human driving skill. All the "too dangerous" racing technologies would be allowed, and the track would have loops and crazy features like a video game. There would be no restrictions on car design aside from size, weight, a 360 3d camera array, and a standard telemetry interface.

In all seriousness, Hot Wheels would probably offer some premium sponsorships there.

What about a game like rocket league? It seems to have a pretty strong competitive and streaming scene and it’s mechanics are pretty straightforward to understand (most people can understand “football with rocket cars” pretty well).

Do they have good camera angles for Counter-Strike? Showing the game through a series of first person perspectives seems like a waste vs some kind of isometric or even interactive camera. I also don't really know of a game that has been designed to look good from the perspective of a spectator instead of just for the players.

They do. Just as they have professional casters, there are some talented folks who specialize in smoothly transitioning to camera angles above, as well as switching first person views so that you don't miss key kills, etc.

I don't know, plenty of "normal" sports have complexity that most people don't understand. Like, how many people really understand the batter-pitcher duel in baseball? That's the very core of the game but most people just see "pitcher throw ball, batter swing, random result".

The thing is these player communities are huge, more people have watched worlds in the past then the Super Bowl.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/14/league-of-legends-gets-more-...

It doesn't make sense to focus on a game with a declining player base like CS:GO, when you have games like Fortnite, that on average have between 2.9 - 4 million people playing at any given time.

To me, the round structure of CS is what makes it most engaging. I watch a lot of League and CS, and having many more rounds to play in CS makes comebacks a lot easier, and so, it makes crafting a game narrative and excitement a lot easier. League is exciting, but a lot harder to get out of a hole than with CS, so barring some crazy plays, it's a harder to make a comeback.

Also many of the rounds in game are miniarcs themselves. First the lull waiting for new round, then the setup, next build up maybe one or two players dying. Then it entering the crescendo and that is either it or we have post plant scenario with an other build up potentially coming to save by single player.

>Maybe besides COD, everything else is too complex and requires to much prerequisite knowledge to really get into.

I think the FGC would strongly object. It's not always easy to know what options a player has at a particular position, but it's always pretty obvious whether someone is doing well. And it's not like the theory of football is that simple either.

> It's not always easy to know what options a player has at a particular position, but it's always pretty obvious whether someone is doing well.

I really need to have at least a basic intuition for "the options a player has" to enjoy watching. As somebody who has never gotten into fighting games, watching one is about as fun as watching election results come in for Dog Catcher of Backwater County. Bars move until somebody wins, but hell if I know why or what was so great about what the winner did. It might as well have been random.

Same goes for a MOBA with 150+ playable champions. Every fight is just a mess of colorful abilities that mean nothing to an outsider. You could watch a 40 minute game and maybe by the end of it understand what the champions do, but then the next one will use new champions. These games can be great fun to play, but they will never have spectator appeal broader than the player community. Which is fine.

You might need those options explained to you, but plenty of people are fine watching in ignorance.

You could liken it to Boxing or MMA, which people will watch without understanding the intricacies of the sport. Similar to Football, it’s easy to tell overall who’s winning or if theres a big swing. Fighting games definitely have this factor.

Unfortunately it's boring as hell to watch over the long term. In a game like CS there is little setup and watching someone getting instagibbed in short engagements is no fun. But maybe the players around it can initiate some drama that keeps people talking, similar to wrestling, but then it's no longer about the game and more about the drama.

It’s similar with F1, it’s extremely boring to watch long term, most of the time it just looks like the cars are following each other, and it’s even worse live where you can only see a sliver of the multi mile long track. Yet it’s still a global phenomenon somehow.

Watching the Netflix series (Formula 1: Drive to Survive), the drama between the racers and the corporate teams that sponsor them do add that personal connection, that keeps all sports going. I am amused to learn from it that Red Bull is somehow allowed to sponsor multiple racing teams (Red Bull Racing and AlphaTauri).

Minor correction, not sponsor, own. Interestingly the tobacco company British American owned a team until 2005 (the team is now the Mercedes team).

E-sports is essentially advertising for computer games. More people that sub to that the more sales a company can get for computer games/hardware etc. Same goes for Twitch - yes there is community that is build aruond that but it is for the underlying reason of making more sales for the businesses.

I only got a small glimpse into this world (specifically, esports betting), but the thing that makes the most sense to me is that esports is driven by gambling. That's the economic engine under the hood.

Might be wrong, but it kinda looked like that was what was going on, just from some of the numbers floating around, and seeing that was the first time esports-as-an-industry made any sense to me at all, as far as how the economics might work out.

> E-sports is essentially advertising for computer games.

No more than live sports are advertising for sports equipment. The real money in sporting events is in the events themselves: advertising dollars, gate receipts, and merchandise. Esports isn't terribly different, except that the gate receipts and merch sales are much lower. The revenue of the game itself is secondary, especially since the publisher rarely plays a major role.

Esports and sports have extremely different revenue models. The differentiator is that no one ‘owns’ traditional sport games. Anyone can make and sell a basketball, but blizzard has a monopoly on over watch. Sport leagues only indirectly make money when people play their game, but for esports it’s extremely direct and also easier to measure.

League of Legends makes multiple billions of dollars a year, not from esport receipts, but from people buying content in the game. The NFL doesn't make a dime when you play football in your backyard.

It's important to note that Counter-Strike's massive popularity (and funding) comes largely from the skin betting industry, which is entirely built around underage gambling. I'm not sure their viewership would survive a proper reckoning with that.

Do you have any source for this? I've been playing Counter-Strike since the original beta, and it's been popular since its creation, far before skins existed. As far as the funding goes, I have no idea, but would love to see some numbers.

I don't belive that there are public numbers disclosing the funding sources for tournaments. Valve throws in a bit, and betting sites are often sponsors.

CS was totally popular before skin's. I recall the riot shield being particularly fun for me.

Counter-strike was massively popular even a decade before it had skins.

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