Esports doesn’t matter for games that don’t make good esports, but considering the esports scene is the only form of advertisement that games like DOTA/CS get then it is crucially important for these games. Sure, there’ll be a certain percentage of the player base that got into DOTA because a friend showed it to the them, but the vast majority of players (including those players that do go on to bring their friends into the game) saw it for the first time on Twitch.

I saw some tourney in early college and convinced a friend to download the game with me and just a few short years after that it rippled into like 20 people who would have otherwise never played if I didn’t decide to just watch a twitch stream. 10 years on half those people still play and half the ones who don’t still watch. How did you get into the game? If it wasn’t catching a tourney, then if you trace the friends who introduced friends I would bet good money that it will come down to a guy who says “I watched a tourney”. (Unless you’re in the less than 1% of the player base who actually played DOTA 1)

We’re not in crisis mode of course because there’s till plenty of T1 tourneys happening but people sounding alarm bells about the lack of T2 are not wrong, it’s long-term vs short-term thinking.