>>394313843
>It's weird since anytime I hear "outsiders" talking about e-sports they're just laughing at it.
Before covid there was a huge push by corps/publishers into Esports because they saw what Valve/Riot had built over the last decade and saw it as an opportunity to shake money out of a lot of impressionable young people. It's similar to the VR investor push of 2016 where a lot of things were overvalued because of FOMO and developers slowly scaled back their plans over the next few years because they realised that it just wasn't sustainable to be going so hard into VR. Covid hit esports very fucking hard for obvious reasons. Publishers like Activision pulled out completely and fired nearly all of their staff. Valve had to shut down the international, but they have enough money to tank the hit anyway. It's more the fact that covid was a unfortunate but arguably needed 'cleansing' to the scene.

Esports can be fun to watch if you're a fan of the game and competitiveness, but I've always felt that the people that cared really hard about it were a bit hollowbrained and it definitely pushed too hard for the few years before covid.