For quite some time now e-sports has been growing at a rapid pace and becoming more and more accepted by the public. The cash prizes for tournaments are getting bigger with every year that passes. Every year more television stations, newspapers, and magazines add segments about how videogames are slowly turning into the next sport. Teams have not only been getting paid enough in salaries to live off of, but players are being sent around the world to live in a new country and practice these games. With every big tournament and worldwide press coverage of e-sports, gamers are getting closer to making this the next big thing. Although e-sports is growing bigger all the time, it is not growing at nearly the pace it could be. E-sports has been stuck in a sort of dormant state for a while and not getting bigger, but not losing too much popularity, but it will happen.
The biggest part of any sport is the coverage that it receives for the fans to watch. Any major league sport was made for the spectators. People don't pay MLB, NBA, and NFL players millions of dollars a year so they can have fun playing the game they love. They pay them millions of dollars to win and to have the spectators come give them more money to watch them play. Right now in the counter-Strike world, as far as coverage goes, it is definitely not headed in the right direction.
To make e-sports grow to its potential there has to be more fan involvement or it will never progress. There was a time when you could sit at home on a CAL-invite night and say to yourself, "There are so many matches tonight, which one should I watch?!". This is no longer the case. As of lately, the case is, "There are only 2 matches on HLTV tonight and I don't like either team. I guess I'll just check later to see who won." If we want to get Counter-Strike out of the state it is in there is going to have to be a lot more coverage of not only CAL-i nights, but even major LAN events. On CAL-i nights it could be so simple to get a major sponsor that can put up HLTV for every match of the night and have people debate on which match to watch. If there was this much coverage, it would be so easy to progress e-sports with a lot more stats, articles, and just people being able to watch their favorite teams play. Right now, unless you are lucky, the only people that know what happened in most of the matches are the 10 people that played in it.
Now some major teams may or may not agree with this idea, because of the pure reason that they do not want their tactics to be public. This is also a major set back. In every sport, teams are able to sit down and watch game film on their opponents for hours at a time and analyze everything they do. This is not a bad thing in any way at all. Being able to watch your opponents is a key factor in making any sport interesting. If a team was able to run the same plays in every game, because nobody knew what they did as a result of poor coverage, nobody would enjoy it. More coverage could ideally make Counter-Strike a more interesting game to play again, just because of the fact that teams had to make new tactics constantly.
There is also another major set back in the progression of e-sports, and that is the silent feud between e-sports sites and competitive leagues. While the heads of 2 major organizations for e-sports communities may have their differences and dislikes of one another it is very much hurting the entire community with what is going on. All disputes must be set aside and a meeting needs to be held between the heads of these organizations and discuss how to get e-sports out of this dormant state and to the next level.
What everyone needs is to sit down and ask themselves is why they are a part of the e-sport community? Do you want to just make money off of this fun hobby? Do you want to be a pioneer for the next big thing that could possibly be the next widely accepted national or even worldwide sport? Some people are satisfied with the way e-sports are progressing right now and think it should take its time. The fact is that there is so much more that everyone could do to get this ball rolling. Everyone knows what is needed to get this to the next level, now the question is just pretty simply, are we dedicated enough to do it?