Absolutely, games with a low skill ceiling don't make for good competitive games. Just look at Starcraft: Brood War, CS 1.6 and SSBM for games with an extremely high skill ceiling (CS 1.6 being the lowest of the bunch). They would have/are lasting forever if not for the companies trying to kill the games to sell some sequel. The newest Smash Bros. title might be popular for a while but they die as soon as a new entry comes along...basically, they are only really capturing the casual audience. CS 1.6 survived CS:S before Valve apparently helped with dying to get CS:GO going which flopped in the beginning. Brood War also easily beats Starcraft 2 with tens of thousands people watching every day, despite Blizzard heavily subsidizing the Starcraft 2 scene (although they have probably stopped by now) and killing the professional BW scene by suing everyone. Third Strike is still more alive than SFIV due to its skill ceiling and well, not having comeback mechanics (not to mention that USFIV is garbage). League of Legends is an example of a casual game being more popular than one with a higher skill ceiling. But that has a lot to do with timing as well as with not requiring some garbage Steam client. While LoL wasn't good in the beginning, it still got kickstarted due to the developers stealing DotA hero designs and illegally sending e-mails to people (it's how I got a closed beta invite). When LoL got better, it profited from the fact that Blizzard was killing the BW scene in South Korea but instead of switching to Starcraft II, a lot just switched to LoL instead. DotA was extremely popular in China and was so even after LoL but since Valve decided to tie DotA 2 to their Steam client, people slowly switched to LoL instead. Same with the SEA regions where DotA and DotA copy HoN were popular for a very long time. So despite not having things like orb priority, creep denying etc, LoL eventually became the biggest MOBA around. And Valve won't ever catch them, considering they have been casualizing DotA 2 for years and their hero design is straight up bad and a lot worse than DotA's. Racing games are also slowly getter bigger for serious competitive gaming but for over 15 years it's been simulation ones and not arcade ones like Gran Turismo and worse. The 2022 Porsche Cup on iracing that ended recently had a 200k prize pool. The Nascar series has 330k in prize money. Games can also somewhat forcefully become a thing but that's due to overwhelming brand strength. It's how Starcraft II got a foothold in the first place but it still lost out in the end. Nevertheless, Blizzard's shooter still seems to be a thing, same with Riot's shooter. A game that I think is genuinely good and has a good skill ceiling is PUBG. And while the mobile version is extremely popular, the PC version could be faring better. Steam requirement, the high system requirements as well as initially costing money really dampened the impact it could have had. Not having a first-person perspective in the beginning also didn't help. As for watching, the lull in the beginning is probably also turning some people off, despite it being of some tactical importance. Also, I might be harping on and on about the Steam client being a requirement but it is actually a serious issue. If not for that, games like Sudden Attack and Crossfire wouldn't exist. And well, the latter is definitely more popular than CS.