Because they are, at least some of them. E-sports has opportunity for making money in ways that some people are never going to have. There's also the entire ability of streaming and earning by doing that stuff. Game promoters paying out to have IAPs pushed as well.

All of this never existed in mine or your days when our parents just knew that video games would ruin us with no way of making money in them. Even the dream of becoming a game developer wasn't even a thing.

You know those after-school math tutoring academies that pop up in American strip malls? One of those opened up near me, but instead of grilling your kids in calc or trig to improve their SAT scores, it's an "esports academy" for young hopefuls.

I think there's more going on culturally than just that. Regular sports got more competitive at a younger age, too, and there has always been the possibility of going pro and earning money from it, plus college scholarships.

That's just progression of the world. The first video game was a simple thing like Pong. Now, we have entire immersive 3D worlds. Someone/something is always the first, but those that come after will/can be bigger, better, faster. The first mass produced car was a Model-T, now we have Mustangs, GTXs, Porsches, blah blah.

Not sure how old you are, but I'm around 30, started playing against others back when CS1.5 was launched, and we participated in our LAN party. It was before I had 24/7 internet connection at home, so after and before school was spent practicing with bots, then once a quarter or something we could play against each other, seeing who had "trained" the best since last time.

Already at that point many of my friends were pretty competitive, even though neither of us really had the means to become HeatoN even if we tried. I think this must have been early 2000s something I think?

There was a competitiveness to it, but it was a fun friendly competitiveness. The kind of competitiveness you have when you go bowling with friends, or play poker. You're trying your hardest to win, sure, but also: it's just fun with friends.

These days "play online" so often means "play with complete strangers you've never talked to before and most likely never will again".

Even for large popular games like Unreal Tournament you typically joined a set of favourite servers, and had the same set of "regulars" hanging around.

It's like old-school relatively small-scale forums vs. reddit or Twitter.

You can still kind-of get this experience if you try hard enough, but it's not really the default and typically nothing is geared towards it.

The thing is that most people who want a more casual multiplayer experience now just have their own servers or play in some other setting where it's easy to just play with your friends and nobody else. They'll play on a private Valheim/Minecraft server, or party up in Warzone or Fortnite, or play a private Civ game hosted p2p, or just visit each other in Animal Crossing. I think in general this is where Gen-Z is moving: less engagement with open platforms, more with private ones. That is why Discord is such a big deal as well. The problem with the current state of the internet is that if you let just anyone in you have to deal with trolls, or bots, or scammers, or incels, or whatever, and nobody wants to deal with that. Even on public chess servers you'll get like five messages a month saying "your opponent was cheating, sorry about that," who actually wants to talk to randos these days?

Back in late 90s that level of competitiveness was there, but was relegated to clans / guilds. Algorithmic match play changed all that because casual play no longer allowed regulars to get to know each other. It made casual competitiveness possible and together with popularity / normalization, many things changed.

As an aside I miss the old days, but i also found grinding overwatch and eventually leveling up in my mid 30s (pre kids) to be incredibly enjoyable and rewarding in spite of the unmanaged toxicity. I don't have any competitive gamer friends and the match play i dislike also made it possible to experience something i think i would not otherwise have had access to.

1.5 came out in 2002, then 1.6 in 2003.

(And Heaton is a dick, just saying.)

A lot more games are structured that way.

I got into online gaming with Cs 1.6 and cs:cz normal online was kinda competitive but you had a lot of joke maps or non competive ones(climbing maps). I don't think they're as popular now since a lot of games have matchmaking and ranked unlocks as the default multilayer. I'm way out of the loop mind you, I learn a lot more to PvE multilayer now(left4dead and deep rock)

The problem is that every modern online game does not allow custom hosted servers. In the good old days of online multiplayer, I would load into a Halo 1 map with 30 other people set to capture the flag (a multiplayer mode that seems to almost not exist anymore!) where the server runs 24/7, and if either side wins, the same players get mixed into two new teams in a "balancing" way, and the game just starts back up. Most people were playing because "I just want to shoot someone" was fun on it's own.

This made online games essentially a public place, where people might even get to know each other and "hang out", and you could join the same people day after day, get to know habits, make friends and rivals, etc. It was extremely low competitiveness, and nothing that happened really mattered. It didn't matter if you sucked or were amazing, because you would likely end up on the team with everyone in the server at some point, so people got wildly different gameplay experiences. This even meant that different servers could target different styles of play. You could go to the really tryhard team deathmatch servers with carefully balanced maps and active admin management for cheaters and balance purposes, or you could join the match on cramped Beaver Creek with zero shields and infinite shotguns and rockets, where average lifespan was measured in tenths of seconds, but that chaos was a great breather if you didn't feel competitive that day.

No matter how shitty you were, you could find a community that felt right to you, and you were likely to even dominate occasionally when you had good days and got lucky, so that even people who suck at the game felt the high of victory.

Nowadays, game devs insist not being utterly steamrolled by minute thirty is "not fun", and enforce near perfect a perfect 1:1 win/loss ratio through matchmaking systems, where you never see the same player twice, so they don't exist as fellow humans in your mind but as hostile "agents" that you must struggle against, and everyone feels average because your instantaneous success is basically driven by who got the advantage in the random matchmaking process. Everyone is forced to feel average about their performance, because everyone is forcibly given an average experience.

A lot of that existed long before now, but it was always opt-in. If you wanted custom servers, you could go have that fun and chaos, but if you were feeling competitive, you could jump into matchmaking and have the enforced global balance of that system give you specific matches you were emotionally prepared for and explicitly seeking out.

BUT..... companies had to get rid of custom servers, because it's way harder to sell digital items for a game if players can just go on private and custom servers that turn off or disable the checks for if you have "purchased" whatever skin you want to wear. All the bullshit A/B testing and metrics companies have made up to assure us that "people like this better" is just to defend their business strategy.

Match making system essentially killed multiplayer games for me. Like yeah, hooray, some random number went up or down. I don't feel like I'm getting any better at the game since there are no notable landmarks(ie. players that are regulars in that server) to measure up against.