It’s because the league is just an advertising vehicle to them. It’s not a traditional sport like the NBA. They can just kill it and keep it pushing because they don’t actually care about the sport.

I don’t care about either sports or esports either, but tbh regular sports seem more pointless to me of the two. Esports are more clearly primarily about skill, but physical sports are to one degree or another a genetic lottery more than a competition, at least at the top professional level.

Like, a guy was born with unusually flippery feet and big lungs and is great at swimming, and he takes the gold medal and is praised to high heaven. Or a guy is born unusually tall and produces less lactic acid in his legs or something, and now he’s an NBA superstar, great. Both people worked their assess off to win and are skilled, doubtlessly, but also, it’s not exactly fair to the short men, or the even marginally less insanely tall men, or to the men who happened to be born with smaller lungs, or who had worse nutrition growing up, or whatever, and who work their assess off just as much. There’s not really a way of totally removing unfair biological advantages from the unfair biological advantages competition to make it actually fair to everyone, but people keep acting like there is.

Anyway I think this is particularly a problem at the insanely narrowed down elite professional sports level we have now, where the margins are razor thin and the difference between the fastest and the slowest runner is only a handful of seconds. By valuing only the extremes, and only the absolute numbers (see also: the much higher popularity of men’s sports over women’s, even though the actual interesting skill and strategy part is the same), when and everyone is training and working themselves equally intensely, it feels reduced to luck of the biological and upbringing and cultural background draw. I want to see displays of skill and ingenuity, not just, oh, this guy was born with a body optimized for speed at short distances, good for him I guess.

I think amateur/non-professional sports are more interesting for this reason. Like in my highschool, one of the best basketball players on the boys’ varsity team was also one of the shortest boys in school, because at that level, skills and effort and training differ enough that it doesn’t come down to boring factors like who’s tallest and so on. Skill and strategy matters more because people aren’t all at the same level or playing by the same playbooks in that regard. It’s more fun to watch, easier to root for someone, I’d think. But then I don’t really watch this either.

More fun to play than to watch others play, imo. I’d pick casual coed soccer with random college friends over professional sports any day. I’d rather watch random idiots play soccer, too, now I think about it. Even the failures could be entertaining, potentially.

Tldr capitalism ruined sports too I guess. Should just be a fun community thing. Although I guess a large part of the point is in the hanging out with other fans, more than in the actual act of watching the sport.

Sorry this is such a derail from the original topic. I may be really sleep deprived and rambly right now. I might look back at this tomorrow and be like “wtf what was I even saying”. Anyway.

I do love speedrunning, though. Speedruns are cool.

Anyway I support the esports unionizers. Don’t let capitalism ruin the esports scene too more than it probably definitely already has, etc etc.

My god I gotta go sleep now. Bye.