FORTUNE -- 2013 will be seen as a turning point in the evolution of eSports, or Electronic Sports, which pit the world's best video game players against one another for huge cash prizes. Over $15 million in prize money will be distributed through video game leagues and tournaments by the close of this year. Professional video gaming is shattering records with each new global tournament. The millions of fans who tune in to watch pros play video games such as League of Legends, StarCraft II, Dota 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II are starting to attract the same type of sponsors that market to traditional sports fans.
TNS: "A League of Legends game mode, Arena, will return with some major changes that may breathe some life for a stagnant game."
ESTNN writes: "Hwei, LeBlanc and Ryze stand above the rest as the strongest players in the League of Legends 14.8 mid-lane due to substantial buffs in their scaling, base damage and crowd control (CC) respectively."
ESTNN write: "Our updated guide on the latest champions coming to Summoner's Rift."
Nice to see eSports in legit outlets.
Because Money corrupts
Money. Duh.
videogaming is not a sport.
It needs sponsors outside of the gaming or tech industries to succeed. The problem is that for an esports scene to develop around a game, there has to be some staying power behind said game. As technology advances, games that were once new become easily playable at highest settings and are no longer a showcase of a sponsor's hardware offerings (save maybe peripherals)
In the mid 2000's there was a huge first person shooter esports scene, and not having sponsors like Coke was part of the reason that scene has died down. Intel, for example, was heavily sponsoring events like CPL, ESWC, and WCG. Back then, CS 1.6 was the most popular game for these events, (save possibly WCG) and Intel had a hard time trying to convince players that they needed a $1000 Pentium 4 Extreme Edition to play a game that was already dated and couldn't showcase new hardware. (Intel, at the time, were already being beaten on by AMD. Intel were pursuing clock speed and L2 cache while AMD went for efficiency. Intel was wrong at the time, and had to follow AMD's lead when they dropped "Pentium" and went with "Core." Maybe this had something to do with dropping sponsorships? I don't know)
Some companies made a name for themselves from this scene, but they did not, at the time, have the financial power to be anywhere near the head sponsor for an event. (Mostly makers of peripherals)
I think the same still applies. Starcraft 2 is not pushing a new Core i7 in terms of power or sales.