Do you feel like this applies to American Football? I don't, but yet it's the most popular sport on TV in America.
What I'm saying is that I don't think your requirements are necessary for a sport to be a popular spectator sport.
In regular sports people can rely on their intuition to know what can and can't happen, to some degree. No football player is going to start flashing yellow while taking off down the field. A lot of video games are packed to the brim with custom physics and mechanics. No solid intuition, you really just have to learn them.
CS benefits from more or less functioning exactly how even a 75 year old lady would expect it to. A sniper is a sniper. A pistol a pistol. An assault rifle is an assault rifle. Bullets kill quick, and bombs go boom.
Honestly, yes. Protestations that it's too difficult to understand seems to me to stem from people who literally want the game explained in three seconds or less.
The core is simple. Team have ball. Team want move ball that way for points. Other team want stop them. Work out the legal ways for them to score points and move ball around as you go. The super detailed lacunae of what penalties are for what exist in all sports, it just isn't generally noticed. The FIFA rules for soccer run 144 pages: https://www.amazon.com/Official-Rules-Soccer-U-S-Federation/... Not a huge book, probably not huge pages, but a great deal more detailed than you'd try to "explain" to someone just learning what soccer is.
Most of the meta around passing plays versus running plays can be explained easily.
It really isn't that complicated.
To the extent that it is, all the sports are. At the top end everything gets complicated, hence, Moneyball and that sort of thing. Basketball is a simple sport of putting the ball in the hoop while dribbling it, but at the top end you start talking about matchups between this guy and that guy and how being 3% better at three-point shots affects this team's matchups against that team... but that's not something you have to care about to watch it, any more than you have to care about what the name of every position is in every sport initially.
To try and give a reason others haven't really mentioned, professional sports tend to have predictable camera angles and pacing, making it easier to get a complete picture of who is doing what and when. In eSports, the arenas are typically strategically complex, requiring similarly complex camera angles, making it difficult to get a sense of what's going on at any point in time.
I think that is a key point. In most sports the arenas are quite simple. Most ball sports have some rectangle and you can judge intuitively whether a team is likely in a better position than another. And even in marathon or triathlon or such the course itself may be complex, but you can reduce it to "X meters till finish line" and "athlete A is in front of B" to get a good enough understanding on the situation.
Of course all sports allow for some amount of tactics, when to play a bit more passive, when to attack, ... but you don't need those for some basic experience while watching.
In eSports the arena is complex and hard to preceive, the physics aren't exact as we all know them, the virtual equipment (weapons, boosters, ...) are unknowns.
And then eSports typically are quick, which makes learning hard.
However you are correct that the objectives in games are usually simple. Push this thing from here to there. Don't let enemy stand here alone. Shoot enemy until no enemy.
In League, there's (at the time of this writing) 140 players (champs) that each have different rules and capabilities assigned to them, because they have different abilities and are used differently strategically. Top/mid/bottom/jungle really doesn't matter much more than player placements like tight-end, offensive tackle, howver.
Counter-Strike has 1 character type, 2 teams, and is so simple to explain. I can explain counter-strike to my mom in one sentence. The places where one should get anxious or excited are immediately obvious to a layperson. Explaining the goal of league is easy, however I'd struggle to explain enough of league to my mom so that she can understand why she should be excited when one specific champ is getting fed, or why the enemy team should be careful about clustering, because of a unique situation in this one specific match that is not always going applicable to a different match.
I'd probably be done explaining a handful of characters by the time the match is over, and she'd forget within 10 minutes. I know this because I've been trying to explain Pokemon since the 90s. She 100% understands football and baseball, however.
For games that involve shooting at people, I'd agree. A particular first-person perspective may be difficult to follow but the core is simple and you can pick up the pieces as you go. Quake deathmatches have a lot of interesting arcana to dig into if you want to play at top level, but you can just watch one without any particular skill. From there you can incrementally pick up that shooting someone before the player even saw them is impressive, or that identifying, acquiring, and plinking them with a rail gun in <500ms is pretty impressive. The speed of these things might be inaccessible, but it's not the rule set that is.
Most things have a novice-level entry ramp. My sons seemed to pick up the basics of American Football in about 5 minutes when they were 8. It really isn't that hard. They didn't encounter their first "safety" until quite a while later, for instance, but their lack of knowledge of what a safety is didn't bother them. I've been watching for a lot longer and still couldn't simply whip off the names of all the positions or anything myself.
Not all esports have that, though. I can say from personal experience though that DOTA is impenetrable if you don't know what's going on. I've been at a local restaurant that was playing some matches for whatever reason. I know about video games in general but know nothing about DOTA. I suppose you could say I understood what it was I didn't understand, but I had no idea who was winning, what a good play was, etc.
There's a step-function there where if a major educational institution started pushing a video game, it'd have the awareness to be a sport. But they don't, so the path forward is tied to the whims of the market.
It may work out that the 20th century pro sports model is just not going to be part of this. That model came from an era combining fast travel, broadcast media, and a small number of large sponsors. At first it was teams who travelled by rail and had their games casted over radio. Later, jet planes and TV. But nowadays, with the streaming model, it's diffused to being able to watch live speedrun attempts, an activity which can resemble watching paint dry at times, but which does bring in some income within a long-tail niche audience.
There are a lot of fiddly details in offsides rules, incomplete passes, extra points, etc. but they aren't necessary to understand and enjoy watching a game.
Born and raised in America, I never knew this. First time I've seen it explained this way.
To my mind, Football is overly complicated, with crap tons of breaks, weird jargon, and a countdown clock that apparently means nothing.
They stop after a play because that’s part of the rules of the game.
It's easier to build a multi billion dollar business around something people have been exposed to since birth.
Most other countries dont know the sport, apart from maybe Commonwealth who play rugby at schools.
As someone that grew up in the US and watching it with family, no, it's not the same. What is the same is watching Cricket. It probably has an even larger viewing audience than American Football in the US. As someone that has grown up with it, and they will start spewing rules at you that might as well be spoken in Klingon for the sense they make, but are perfectly understood by those that grew up with it. To be fair, reversing the conversation for me to explain rules to them is met with looks like I have 2 heads.
Video games are similar. I grew up in the "golden age" of home console games starting with Atari 2600, NES, and through today. However, I still spent time doing other things other than games. So to me, sitting around watching other people play video games is a non-starter. Maybe if I was at a bar and it was on the screen, but usually I just find a different screen. For people that are younger that don't have memories of playing outside and only know "playing" involving a computer device of some sort, then this seems perfectly reasonable that's what they'd rather watch.
Obviously there are nuances but that's 90% of it right there, in a lot less than 10 minutes.
Try to get to the end zone, if you do you score 6 points. You have 4 attempts to move forward 10 yards, if you don't, the ball goes to the other team. If you have more points, you win.
That's it, that's all you need to know to watch it and enjoy it. Sure, there's more ways of scoring and the details of each position, the routes they are running and play-calling in general is interesting, but it's not needed to just watch the game.
I assume in this scenario the terrorist team is trying to plant and detonate the bomb, thereby diffusing its (perhaps damaging, poisonous, or radioactive) components over a wide area, while the counter-terrorist team is trying to defuse the bomb and prevent it from exploding in the first place.
And you could say the same about CS, your market is probably "anyone who has played a first-person shooter"
Saying you can boil it down to one side moves a ball the other side tries to stop them is pretty disingenuous. You can boil down basically any game to that. Counter strike you just kill the other team, mobas you just destroy the other teams base, etc. I know you didn't make that point but that's what most of the arguments in this thread are.
Compared to that number, nobody grows up watching Dota.