 There's a lot of money in traditional sports. In e-sports, not so much. For 2022, the global e-sports market was valued at just slightly over 1.38 billion U.S. dollars. Barial lang yun compared to traditional sports. The NBA made over 10 billion U.S. dollars for the 2021-2022 season. FIFA made 7.5 billion U.S. dollars from the recently concluded World Cup. E-sports is always hyped as the next big thing. Supposedly, it will grow larger than traditional sports. But I don't think that's gonna happen. And the reason why might not be what you think. Just like the really cheap prices for Windows 10 activation codes from our sponsor might surprise you. Check out CDKEOVERSE.com An obvious reason, but not THE reason why e-sports doesn't have the same following as traditional sports is that it lacks physicality. Sports are fun to watch because, at a minute, we enjoy watching other people break their bodies and do all other people in a contest to see whose body will give out first while both attempt to complete a completely arbitrary goal. Whether it's two MMA fighters trashing each other in the octagon, two teams battling it out on the grid iron, or the elegant leap of a polewalter, a large appeal of any sport is its physicality, showing us the limits of our endurance, strength, and fortitude. Higher, faster, stronger, ikangan ng olympics. Compare that to how an average e-sports athlete looks like. Not very athletic. And there's nothing very physical in clicking buttons no matter how many actions per minute you do. But as I said, that doesn't matter because people DO watch gaming. Essentially, pro sports lives or dies on its popularity. More fans, more views, more excitement, more interest, more money. And there is a lot of interest in gaming and consequently in e-sports. The appeal might not be the physicality of play, but there is definitely appeal there. And you see this from the millions of fans who catapult streamers to A-list celebrity status, or to the dedicated followers of e-sports players. So if the audience is there, what's holding e-sports back? The real reason why e-sports will never take off is because it lacks balls. This kind of ball. Take a look at this clip. Even if you don't know anything about basketball, you can immediately figure some things out. One blue player has the ball and is making sure all of the white shirts chasing him don't get it. He has to stop at a certain line and now that he's drawn all of the white shirts to him, he throws the ball to a teammate who is now open to toss the ball into the basket. Zero basketball knowledge, but you can already figure out tactics, mechanics, playing area, and the skill levels of both the key blue players in this sequence. All because the ball is a central point of attention and the way the players interact with it indicates to the audience how the game is played. This is true for most any sport, football, American football, tennis, golf, billiards. Watching the ball is a central point of attention and it's an information rich point. Well, except for rugby, no one understands rugby. Contrast this to an esport, say Overwatch. I played a fair amount of Overwatch 1 and am playing a fair amount of Overwatch 2. And yet with hundreds of hours of game time, even I don't know what on God's screen earth is going on here. Ang gulo. For sure esports athletes are skilled and their decision-making prowess is exceptional. But a mainstream audience can't appreciate all of that because the game doesn't intuitively communicate what is going on in the game. Without a central point of attention, a ball, an audience might be watching one character healing, one character charging, one character sniping, and everything is disjointed. So what if this character triggered her ultimate at the exact crucial moment to buffer a tank which led the tank to a team kill? All a general audience got from that is not admiration but confusion. What's an ult, what's a buff, and what do tanks have to do with the game? So actually, the real reason why esports will never take off is because of us, the audience. To appeal to a general audience, esports needs to dumb down its complexity or at least give us something basic to latch onto so that we can start figuring out the game on our own. Till esports have the digital equivalent of balls, the skill, and acuity of its players will go underappreciated.