Putting esports on TV is a mistake, and I’m desperately trying to understand why it’s one we keep making.

That’s not to say it’s some sort of industry-ending, catastrophic mistake, it’s just bizarre. Esports doesn’t get much out of being on TV, and so far, TV hasn’t really gotten anything out of esports either. Right now, esports is on TV thanks to ELEAGUE, ESPN’s occasional Street Fighter V broadcasts and the Big Ten Network’s collegiate League of Legends broadcast, but we’ve been here before. Like a dog returning to its vomit, esports always ends up coming back to TV, forgetting the mess we made last time.

The first televised esports broadcast in the West was MLG’s 2006 Halo Pro Circuit, but it wasn’t quite what you think of when you think about esports on TV. The broadcasts were pre-recorded, with only two spotlight games per 40-minute episode. We’ve come a long way since then, but it was a very different experience than watching games live on early streaming platforms.

That in itself makes a lot of sense — you need to make TV more interesting to people who could just watch the games on their computers — but it does seem like something less attractive than the standard broadcast. You got a few little talking-head style interviews with a handful of pros, but you didn’t get all the games and you didn’t get a live feed. It was supplementary.

The Championship Gaming Series broadcasts on DirecTV were similar, and it wasn’t just about esports. Video game-focused programming has never done well on TV, just look at G4, which NBCUniversal axed back in 2014 after years of middling ratings. The gaming audience is used to being ignored by mainstream media, and esports is just another example. At this point, we don’t need TV, we have Twitch and YouTube and Twitter.

The worst part is that this is still happening. ELEAGUE’s current Street Fighter V broadcasts are interminable. They aren’t on TV yet, but they will be, and right now it takes eight hours to play through a single round-robin group of eight players when the average match time sits at about five minutes. Back to back, all 28 matches could take around two and a half hours, but instead, we were subjected to constant commercial breaks and cuts to an analyst desk vamping between every single best-of-two set.

Meanwhile, ELEAGUE’s CS:GO broadcasts didn’t exactly set Nielsen on fire, while still doing decently on Twitch. ESPN 2’s Capcom Cup broadcast only showed the Top 3 matches, a whole day after the event ended and neither that nor their live EVO broadcast managed to beat Twitch viewership.

Yankees/Red Sox averaged 2.066 million on ESPN.



EVO World Championships: 201K on ESPN2. — Sports TV Ratings (@SportsTVRatings) July 19, 2016

TV doesn’t seem to understand esports, not enough to drive viewership. They didn’t in 2006, and they don’t now.

To be fair, ELEAGUE’s heart is definitely in the right place. All their broadcasts feature talent and personalities that really reflect the scenes they’re trying to showcase, and they really do want to make this work given that their Street Fighter broadcast added little things fans asked for after the first day of games. ELEAGUE's CS:GO and Street Fighter broadcasts look great and feature great matches.

It’s even theoretically profitable. If you can combine the 1.2 million peak concurrent Twitch views ELEAGUE got during the last CS:GO Major with traditional advertising revenue, you’re poised to make a ton of money. ELEAGUE is resonating with fans on Twitch, the issue is that it’s very hard to fit the traditional esports broadcast on TV, and anything supplemental just feels inessential to the core fan base.

But esports always gets excited to be on TV. Being on TV means you “made it” these days, because TV is an older, respected medium and it’s noticing us, an industry still in its awkward, misfit adolescence. The question is if TV really should be as respected as it is seems to be among esports folks. TV ratings are down across the board, and esports is now being looked at as something that can buoy a sinking ship. Here’s the thing though: esports was one of the things that sunk it.

Along with streaming sites like Netflix and YouTube, Twitch is another place to go to for live entertainment that is more convenient and approximately 100 percent more free than buying a cable package. Esports drive a lot of Twitch viewership, and TV stations that are losing viewers have nothing to lose by spending relatively minimal amounts of cash to try and see if esports fans follow their favorite games to a dying medium.

We’re always hype for it online, but the ratings never match up when it counts. The networks kill it, realizing esports fans prefer live broadcasts with Twitch chat and clips and a format that’s mostly unviable for big-name advertisers. And then they keep losing viewers, so they try again, maybe with a different game. And esports fans get excited that they’re on ESPN or TBS or USA, that they’ve made it.

We sure have “made it” a lot in the last 11 years.

Grade: C- — Esports on TV has not worked since 2006, and it’s not magically working now that we’re actually broadcasting live games with good production values. Esports is so ingrained in the digital space that a TV broadcast would have to offer a lot of added value to make the audience care, and for all the genuinely hard work that ELEAGUE has done, they haven’t found it yet. Meanwhile, other esports-related TV broadcasts are far more supplementary and feel unnecessary in a world where fans just want to watch the game live, and talk about it on Twitter and Reddit later.