Not to mention, the sport being played is essentially whatever the "cool" game is at the time, which changes year after year. It would be difficult to maintain interest in a game for even 2 Olympic cycles, let alone hundreds. Can Starcraft 1 still generate massive world-wide interest in 2013? How will LoL be doing in 2023?
Meanwhile traditional gaming and sports haven't changed a whole lot over the hundreds or even thousands of years we have played them, they have stood the test of time and are still capable of generating massive world-wide interest. Video games cannot claim to have done this.
With that said Im not against awarding visas to pro gamers.
I think the evolution of the playing field is actually a great thing, and something I wish conventional sports did more. A rule change in a physical sport happens so rarely.
The only reason conventional sports remain balanced and interesting to watch at all is because they are nearly 100% symmetrical (ex: 5 on 5, symmetric court/field, tip-off to start, etc). In my opinion, this actually leaves a lot of sports as pretty poorly designed "games" -- any activity that you can assign a score to can turn into a competitive sport under the existing physical sport paradigm. I don't want to pick on any particular sport, but I think a lot of popular sports just ride on past passion, nationalistic/regional pride (rooting for your team), and sponsorship marketing rather than the game itself being intrinsically interesting to watch. Which could be an endless cycle, with schools giving scholarships for those who perform in those sports, and the next generation having the same feelings for them.
More importantly than having a wider viewership for eSports (as a game designer and developer by trade, this is obviously exciting), I'm more excited about how this will affect physical sports, and force them to evolve into becoming more entertaining and fun experiences than they already are, instead of stagnating as they have been for nearly a century.
They change less frequent, but they do change. Wikipedia has a list of rules and changes of soccer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_the_Game_(association_f...
I also have some other problems with "pro gaming" being seen as legitimate due to the insane impact corporate sponsorships have on the landscape of competitive gaming.
Granted, massive corporate sponsorships are nothing new to sports, but there's nothing in other sports quite equal to the situation in console gaming where Microsoft is the official console of competitive Call of Duty gaming. Even though the game can be played on many consoles, to play it as a "sport" you need to be playing it on the Xbox. This goes well beyond the already unfortunate lengths to which corporate sponsorships impact other sports, IMO.
And thanks to Microsoft's hardline "no cross-platform play" guidelines for the Xbox line, this isn't something that can be easily solved even if everyone but Microsoft wanted to do it.
Do we have an opportunity for you!
And the heat (racing cars become hot, to say nothing of the fireproof suit), the noise (they are very noisy) and the fact you are actually risking your life (or, at least, serious injury). The most damage Gran Turismo 4 can cause is an RSI...
Games spectatorship pushes all the same buttons that real sports do, and Riot is very intelligently pushing it in the same direction, with the excitable commentators and highlighting the personalities of the top players.
The kids are making money by training to be the best at something that is fun to watch, and businesses are making money off marketing them. Seems analogous to sports in the important ways.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/45306416/ns/health-diet_and_nutrit...
The reason why Koreans seem to dominate eSport games such as Starcraft 2 (SC2) is that they practice 12+ hours a day in a tiny apartment chockfull of other players.
The winnings are good: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Winnings , and the top players receive salaries but it's very cutthroat.
I don't follow League of Legends (LoL) (which the OP is talkin g about), however they really have paved the way for this as they fought extremely hard. LoL doesn't have as many open tournaments as SC2, however the main tournament (LCS) is run by Riot, the company who made League of Legends. Their typical viewers for livestreaming on sites like Twitch surpass atleast 100,000+ viewers. It's a crazy world out there.
Of course this is true of most of those who dream of a career in "traditional" sports as well.
Only a few people become good enough to get paid to play sports, and of those people even fewer can get paid enough to turn it into a viable career. Banking your life on getting lucky like that without any kind of fallback plan is not a particularly sound decision.
As an example, I knew many D1 tennis players who could charge upwards of 70$ an hour teaching private lessons (of which the club would take ~20$). I know one guy who is a pretty exceptional player but no where near good enough to make a living on the professional tour, and he brings in about 50,000$ every summer, then goes on tour with his band all winter.
I was merely a good high school player and even back then I was making 15/hr coaching and 25/hr for lessons. That's more than I make now sadly!
Should have betted on that.
