[lupusreal]

> "Esports" games require absolutely massive communities (e.g., marketing) and no open-source game has even come close to the scale required to sustain an esport.

If by "sustain an esport" you mean as a profitable enterprise, then probably not. Is that the best metric though? Open source games can become popular enough for competitive scenes to emerge; Warsow is an example of this.

Popular enough for competitive play but not enough to get corporate sponsors seems fine to me. It's probably not healthy to be promoting the idea (to kids particularly) that playing video games can be a profitable career.

[busterarm]

No I mean "sustain an esport" the same as I would mean "sustain a sport".

For it to be an actual contest it needs an actual sample size of players. Sports need spectators and narratives that generate interest.

Nobody gives a damn about Warsow the same way nobody gave a damn about Ferret-Legging.

It's not a sport if its players are limited to "you and your mates from round the way", that's just a game. Sports are meant to expose the limits of human potential.

[lupusreal]

Warsow's popularity fell off but it was there for a while. You can't reasonably expect every game to stay popular forever, not be the most popular around. It's not like every ball sport other than football/soccer is a failure just because "nobody cares about it" relative to that.