[blahblah123456]

It's counterintuitive, but if you look at eSports players, the prime years are much lower (both the start and the end). You do see 16 year olds at the top but you never see 30 year olds. It feels like the prime is really 16-25. Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important, and hands are one of the worst things to wear out. More parts != more wear out. There's a reason why there are (general) physical therapists and physical therapists who specialize in hands. Hands are incredibly complex and soft tissue injuries heal very poorly due to lack of blood supply.

I doubt the boredom thing is that different for sports vs eSports. At least with eSports the game is changing due to patches. With sports, the game itself hardly changes.

For citation: see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... you can see reaction time starts to drop off rapidly starting at age 25

[jackothy]

Re: Boredom

eSports players spend a lot more time playing than normal athletes. You can only be physically active for a few hours per day. eSports players can do a lot more, like tyler1 who consistently streams for 10+ hours 5 days a week.

Normal athletes arguably also get more variation. Football players don't play back to back football matches all day every day, they practice and improve in a lot of other ways. They also get more variation due to traveling around to play away games.

[tester756]

> You do see 16 year olds at the top but you never see 30 year olds.

In CS:GO there were players around their 30s and were successful

https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro

e.g

>2016-07-30 1st S-Tier Offline ELEAGUE ELEAGUE Season 1 2 : 0 Fnatic $400,000

[mym1990]

Its not really counterintuitive, the prime years are lower because true physical development in physical sports starts at a later age, everything up to that point is related to building a physical foundation for movement, building an interest in the sport, and laying groundwork for proper mechanics.

There is also societal stigma from playing video games seriously past early 20s(well atleast 5-10+ years ago, but with Twitch and things it is now way more accceptable).

"Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important" is laughable.