Few people actually discuss the topic in public but I have this idea that the main driver for esports growth is games. In this article, I’ll focus on a pattern that could be observed for Counter-Strike and League of Legends, the 2 games with the biggest viewerships on Twitch in 2016.

In late 1999, I opened a gaming center in downtown Paris together with friends. I had already chosen esports as a carreer path — what a fool — and Starcraft was our game of choice. We had other friends the same age, 18 to 20, who liked Quake more and we had mutual respect for each other.

Quake and Starcraft then stood at the forefront of what we already called esports, yet they didn’t make most of our business at the gaming center.

From the very beginning, our place was filled with kids in their early teens, screaming and yelling all day-long as they were playing a new FPS game. This new game was worthy of nothing according to Quake players around us.

Yes, the new game was immensely popular, way more than Starcraft and Quake combined… but it was “a game of no skill, slow-paced and in which one could hide behind crates at any time”. It was, according to the established esports crowd “a shitty game for people who didn’t really know how to appreciate quality multiplayer games”.

That game was Counter-Strike.