This is off the mark IMO, depending on your definition of esports.
As a founder of a competitive gaming startup, I can tell you that every single game publisher lives and dies on the casual players.
Most of these players have never seen a single pro match in their life, so the notion that popular games were built for PPV is misguided.
What these publishers realized is that giving people a rank makes them more dedicated to playing more and beating others, as well as a sense of progress. sprinkle some repetitiveness, awards, vanity stuff and the hook is even stronger.
It’s probably some intrinsic human behavior (monkey brain stuff), but it works well for their bottom line.
Do I miss the good ol’ Warcraft 3 dota days? Hell yeah. But I remember one times I set up a “community” match against several of my countrymen. My friends and I were demolished. It was obvious they knew something we didn’t.
We only discovered it when we moved to HoN - the meta.
The real fun was always custom maps - we kept playing those into our 30s.
But I do agree that wacky is fun. There’s still competitive mini games in Dota 2 that are super fun and wacky. Missed opportunity if you ask me.
As a founder of a competitive gaming startup, I can tell you that every single game publisher lives and dies on the casual players.
Most of these players have never seen a single pro match in their life, so the notion that popular games were built for PPV is misguided.
What these publishers realized is that giving people a rank makes them more dedicated to playing more and beating others, as well as a sense of progress. sprinkle some repetitiveness, awards, vanity stuff and the hook is even stronger.
It’s probably some intrinsic human behavior (monkey brain stuff), but it works well for their bottom line.
Do I miss the good ol’ Warcraft 3 dota days? Hell yeah. But I remember one times I set up a “community” match against several of my countrymen. My friends and I were demolished. It was obvious they knew something we didn’t.
We only discovered it when we moved to HoN - the meta.
The real fun was always custom maps - we kept playing those into our 30s.
But I do agree that wacky is fun. There’s still competitive mini games in Dota 2 that are super fun and wacky. Missed opportunity if you ask me.