Dawn Of The Dumb: We Need A Better Class Of Fan

The stupidity that permeates the esports industry starts with the fans that everyone is so desperate to pander to.

As regulars will know I’m currently on holiday, a month long retreat from the stresses of fighting the losing battle for the soul of esports. I have long since made peace with defeat, accepted that this was always an industry where only grifters and turncoats could truly thrive. It is right and good to hate esports now because it has become what everyone used to joke it was; it is now the refuge for all the losers and incompetents who failed in entertainment and sports, propped up by the chancers and grifters with access to vast pools of money. It’s a sham and everything in it is fair game to be criticised because it has consistently gone in the wrong direction for the last six years and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

I can see people cheering this new influx of blood money, sums so vast they make you recant everything you’ve ever believed all so you can live like that one cunt in The Matrix eating his synthesized steak and I can see many respected colleagues asking for it medium rare. It won’t be long now, the unholy alliance of wealthy tyrannies and egomaniacal games developers will control everything and if you want to stay here you’ll be forced into unconditional surrender.

But not me Bubba. I will take to the hills and live on lichen before they play that video of me in a jumpsuit saying how the state was right all along. Rainwater is free and in a few places even safe to drink. My tastes have always been frugal I shall tell myself as I sleep beneath a canopy of rotting trees. My cause is a righteous one after all.

From this vantage point I have watched recent esports events unfold. At the time of writing this in CS:GO Valve has finally acknowledged the long term harm done by the partnered leagues program and said they won’t be allowed moving forward. I told everyone this was coming months ago but the consensus then was “I doubt Valve will actually do anything” and yet here we are. The average fan, who couldn’t accept that partnered leagues were eroding competition because their favourite team has never had a better chance to win a meaningless tournament, now cheered for the abolition of the partnered leagues in 2025 without even being able to articulate why it was good.

Then there was IEM Cologne, one last time in the supposed “Cathedral of Counterstrike” where the same teams that play all year round in a listless, disinterested fashion played listless, disinterested Counterstrike which on air talent pretended was good for the sake of the eclipsing CS:GO charade. Competitively speaking the past eighteen months have been an embarrassing lowpoint in the history of the game… Tournaments unable to be played without stand-ins, form teams excluded due to non-partnered status, formats that give multiple chances to advance or include single map matches, teams content to carry players clearly not up to the standard because you don’t really need to be the best, only good enough to beat the half a dozen other teams you regularly play. Throw in the minds of most none of it matters because CS2 is round the corner and is it any wonder no one can be bothered? Ah but the fans… The fans will tell you this is the greatest era that has ever been because it just so happens to be the one they were around for.

There were many “storylines” over the course of the deliberately padded event but they all had one thing in common. They underlined just how fickle, stupid and hypocritical everything in this industry actually is. These are qualities I’m going to collectively group under the word dumb and it’s this collective dumbness that might be the worst thing of all. Betraying your values for money can at least makes sense through the right kind of lens but why does the whole industry have to be so stupid?

That dumbness really started with a refusal to remain faithful to what esports was meant to be and instead turn into some unholy combination of sports, gaming and streaming culture. This attracted exactly the type of fan no one should want. It’s the one area of the industry we constantly ignore, which is odd given how much criticism is baked into the esports fandom. What if then I could say my observation is that the average esports fan is a freeloading, functionally illiterate teenager and Incredibly, somehow this is the demographic that has shaped and is shaping the direction that esports heads in?

A quick point of information for the uninitiated. As a former sports columnist I can tell you that the average sports fan is dumb. Like really dumb. The level of discourse in sports is basically a flick through the DSM handbook. You will see delusion, cognitive dissonance and even psychopathy on display in the average exchange. The hopeless sports fan is a dumb beast, lacking the critical self-awareness necessary for them to understand their view of the world is coloured by bias. Every few weeks you will read a news story about people who ruin their own lives just so they can say something unspeakably awful to a professional athlete or get arrested after a spur of the moment pitch invasion. They dedicate their lives to something that their own psychological prejudices will never let them understand.

Now grasp, if you can, the inarguable fact that the average esports fan is dumber than that and often too young to have developed any basic social skills that would stop that at least some of that stupidity spilling out into the public domain. Raised on a diet of anime and TikTok trends they drift from scene to scene until they eventually grow up, develop the bare minimum skills required for real life, then leave it all behind. In the meantime as much as they say esports matters to them we know that it’s an ephemeral interest. It’s just content. 

They say they care about the games but really only engage with the “drama.” They are over-invested about minutiae but apathetic to the big picture. They criticise everything but contribute nothing. All that might be insufferable but ultimately tolerable but the worst thing is they want everything but pay for nothing. They openly admit that if esports cost them even a dollar they’d leave it all behind without a second thought. The logos they have on their social media accounts have all the permanence of an I LOVE NEW YORK T-shirt purchased from JFK airport. For all the stupidity of the average sports fan at least there’s no force on the planet that can stop them making fools of themselves, every weekend, regular as clockwork. “Arsenal Till I Die” they chant. There’s nothing analogous to that in the world of esports. Not only are those fans dumb, they are dumb tourists.

This breed of fan has no moral values and only one guiding principle. What is that you might wonder…  Well it is the agreement that there is only one bad thing that can exist in esports and it is those with opinions they don’t like, expressed confidently. That type of individual reminds them too much of things they don’t like from their limited frame of reference. A teacher who tells them they must do better. An anime antagonist who declares they cannot be defeated. A TikTok influencer that exudes arrogance. That is their tiny frame of reference for the world and so the professionals must operate in an industry where fans will support some of the worst kind of social behaviours as long as the perpetrator can feign contrition and locate the right tone of pandering apology. The flip side to that coin is if you ever express an unpopular opinion then you are forever the villain. The problem with this is that it bleeds into everything else. This is one of the main reasons that we’ve ended up with a space that is impossible for skilled adults to function in. Your hiring prospects literally revolve around the public watercooler talk of the emotionally stunted. Be pure. Be vigilant. Behave.

Of course you’re not supposed to say this. In any industry that wants so desperately to convert the big number into big money you cannot say that you deserve a better class of fan. This is why we end up with tournament operators refusing to throw out those who would disrupt a tournament by cheating or pandering to influencers who would put a teenager’s safety at risk by dedicating part of their broadcast to obviously fallacious cheating allegations. Like a faded rockstar in the era before the advent of video phones every stop on the tour has the BEST FANS in the world. Salaried professionals hired to do jobs have their ideas and opinions contradicted based on whatever “feedback” the plebs upvote to the front page of Reddit, actively sought feedback from those least qualified to give it.

The fan’s outlook makes everything stupid because the people further up the foodchain can’t untether themselves from the stupidity. Instead they cater to it because if they do they know it will achieve “engagement” from the rabble. And even though we all know after two decades of haemorraging money that the engagement alone is utterly worthless, no one has any better ideas so it’ll have to do.

Take for example this recent tweet by ESL who continue to treat the esports they profess to love with borderline contempt. A side by side comparison of Christopher “GeT_RiGhT” Alesund and Ilya “m0nesy” Osipov referring to them both as “legends” . Of course the photo on the left features one of the greatest CS players of all time having an emotional reaction to finally winning a trophy that looked increasingly likely to elude him after his team had started to fall down the rankings. The one on the right features a young player who may arguably be the best player in the world right now but has had a career as short as the average esports fan’s attention span. The trophy he won wasn’t a Major and was the second trophy he had lifted in a year where no team has emerged as dominant or even consistently decent. Who is a tweet like this for? Certainly not a real fan of the sport. Certainly not anyone with half a functioning brain. And yet there it is, a retcon not only of history but of the English language itself lapped up by idiots applauding like circus seals presented with a mackerel.

Dumbness also leads to forgetfulness. Since as no-one can remember anything beyond three months makes nobody try to make anything memorable. Tournaments are bland slop now, only distinguishable from one another by minor differences to the HUD or which broadcast talent go through the pretence. Everything is just a content delivery system designed to drag you away from everything else in the attention economy. The sport isn’t even secondary, it’s way down the pecking order. This is how you end up with CS:GO World Championships featuring a segment where a frat-boy masquerading as a journalist points at his favourite jerseys and grunts.

Esports has bigger problems than Saudi ownership and market corrections in its future if we continue down this road. Those problems are ones that will likely resolve themselves over time. Saudi theoretically can’t own everything, market corrections are nominally good in the long term even if they bring short term pain. But if we continue to be a festival for the dumb, an expensive show put on for fans that barely even remember why they were watching in the first place, there really is no fixing that. The sooner we whittle the fans down to those who actually care enough about esports to not only pay for it but engage with it as the sport it’s supposed to be the better. Until that day though everything will remain dumb and getting dumber by the second.