Esports are dramatic

There's an aspect of esports I love, though it's also kind of bad.  That being the stakes of the competition.

In the NBA, you've "made it" the second you're drafted into the league.  You're signed to a 7-8 figure guaranteed contract.  Of course there's incentive to keep developing and eventually sign a 9 figure contract, but you are in an elite tier of earners starting very young, some as teenagers.  And winning honestly does not correlate to this income at all.  And so the only real drive to win for notable players is their innate competitive spirit.

I do quickly want to shout out Richard Jefferson for writing a fantastic piece about winning a championship for Cleveland.  It's a great read, but to be honest, I don't believe this level of emotional attachment is there for most players.

Back in the day, a big StarCraft II tournament could be half of a player's earnings for the year - could be way more honestly.  Victory and defeat felt more emotional because there were real, tangible effects to the players' lives.  You could fly to MLG and walk away with either $10k or $1k - and when your earnings for the year is on the magnitude of $50-100k, that is a substantial difference.  So your performance over time had an outsized impact on your income - for top players it could double, triple, even 10x over other players of similar skill if you won the right events.  Winning an NBA championship would not do this for the players, not even close.

Now this is also bad because it means professional esports players (most of them) lived inherently more unstable lives, where the outcomes were also highly skewed, some players could pull in $10k while others were winning $400k+.  A more managed ecosystem could ensure salaries and reduce a lot of stress that came with the lifestyle.

So it feels like a tradeoff between a stable, healthy ecosystem and more raw, emotional competition.  Obviously as your professional scene finds more success you lean harder into the latter for the wellbeing of the players, but you do lose something there.

One last example I think of is LCS, where at its peak the top players were signing 7-8 figure contracts, and every team had salaried players, and the league played in seasons.  And while it was very cool to see such a legitimized esports league, I often felt the same detachment from the players that I do with regular sports.