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This is probably a topic likely done to death on other forums (and probably here as well), but I'll start a discussion on this anyway since I saw something interesting:

So David Szymanski (developer of DUSK and Iron Lung) has posted some thoughts claiming that FPS multiplayer games peaked around the early 2000s, implying that a focus on Esports, rankings, and limiting interactions between different players (like through matchmaking) has made multiplayer games less fun. But even though David seemed to explicitly mention multiplayer FPS, I think this could also apply to other multiplayer games as well.

So here's how I see it: a focus on competitiveness most certainly is a great way to cultivate a toxic environment, e.g Overwatch, League of Legends, Fortnite (guess you can say battle royale in general). That, and the vast amounts of money that gets involved in eSports means that some devs can get enticed by their own greed thinking they can tap into that market, to the detriment of making an actually fun or unique game (Off the top of my head, Lawbreakers marketed itself as a hypercompetitive sweatfest and flopped, and DOA6's attempt at getting into eSports was a major factor in its failure).

These are my thoughts, a bit jumbled up as they are, and it's mostly because I don't play online multiplayer games so everything's based on my observations.
I'm interested in your thoughts though. Do you agree with David Szymanski's assessment or not? And why?

I was watching my friend today play a match of TF2 classic. He was in a control point map where everyone on his team spontaneously (without voice chat) decided to play engineers on both attack and defense. Sprays of furry porn and anime girls dancing were being plastered all over walls, emotes were being spammed nonstop "MOVING THAT GEAR UP", and the full stack of engineers obviously lost. It was pure chaos but it was the most fun I've seen in a multiplayer FPS in a while.

It feels like a bygone era. The focus on a balanced, tailored, perfectly even and clean experience has watered down the pure chaos of older multiplayer games. There's potentially significant money and community to be made in having an esports community but it comes at the expense I think of what a your casual community can do. The lifespan of TF2 and the things people can and have done with it I think prove that a focus on esports does not equate to longevity or fun of game, but it doesn't exactly rake in a lot of money either.

I think with the advent of MMOs, social media, and games in general being more accepted as a popular medium this was bound to happen regardless, but esports has definitely tailored the design of games towards something more sterile.

"E-sports," as it has come to be called, is a plague
I have never seen something as explicitly and intrinsically fun as videogames made into something so procedurally stale and stripped of any and all recreational value. Every time I see one of these "E-sports" teams, I feel heat at the top of my head and sickness in my gut. it is the single most corporatized, sterilized, and soulless take on the idea of video gaming I have ever seen in my life. When I think of playing games with friends, I think my maybe inviting someone over for some Tekken or Smash or SoulCalibur, or maybe joining up with some guys on a TF2 community server. I don;t think about a team of Asian/white slaves in plastic made-in-Vietnam shirts emblazoned with scores of corporate sponsor logos while a personality-devoid "Team Manager" hypes them up for an unenthusiastic audience before instructing them all to consume the sponsors' products for fifteen minutes followed by a quick and detached five-minute spurt of gameplay overlaid with shrill and worthless commentary provided by some nasally twenty-something using meaningless jargon to explain every pixel of meaningless action on-screen with another fifteen-minute advertising orgy afterward. It is the scientifically perfected methodology of stripping a medium of any and all merit to replace it with rote tedium and banal commercialism.

I cannot express my hatred of it more vehemently.

Esports is cringe. It's also practically a death sentence for a game's ability to remain relevant.

Too many games have killed themselves trying to be an esport or chasing the esports audience.

The only "esports" that are worth anything are fighting games. Watching pro Tekken or KOF hits different.

I consider Esports to be one of the bullets that brought down Blizzard back in the day, but in an un-straightforward manner.

At one point in time the Esports design maxim had forced its way into just about everyone of Blizzard's games. It all started with DOTA which was derived from Warcraft 3 but ended up being owned by Valve and went on to become a massive moneymaker. As evident by the legal paperwork and general reception of WC3: Reformed, Blizzard never got over this loss.

I only ever played WoW and mostly stuck to PvE but even then you could see Blizzard really starting to lean into the Esports scene. It first started with Starcraft as Blizzard's Esports vehicle for a while, but then they made Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and Overwatch all one after another. All of them different genres of games but all with some competitive multi-player focus in mind. The Esports maxim even was forced into WoW, Blizzard had aspirations of turning PvP Arena and even Hardcore Raiding into competitive sports.

In a short time frame, Blizzard's focus went from engaging storybased RPG and strategy games to hyperfocused multi-player experiences. If you had played Blizzard's games at the time then one problem you would have immediately noticed is that Blizzard cannot balance worth nothing. WoW was nowhere closed to being balanced around 2v2 and you only need to glimpse Overwatch's balance history to know how well that went.

All in all. Esports is not responsible for bringing down Blizzard but it definitely foreshadowed a lot of the poor design decisions you would see later on.

Pretty much the only time I actually enjoyed watching eSports was when Arena and Starcade was on G4. (The latter of which, being produced in the 80s, has nothing in common with modern competitive gaming.)

Pretty much everything I can say about the topic has already been said, but here's a video which I think at least explains WHY developers shouldn't listen to Pro-Gamers when developing a game.

Basically, by catering to the competitive crowd, you are willingly designing a game that is detrimental to the enjoyment of everyone else.

To add my thoughts into the mix, I have pretty much never liked the competitive gaming scene, mainly because I've always been a casual gamer. That's not to say that I don't like a good competition, I just don't like it when the competition is so glorified that it becomes someone's job to play that game, or that the competition meta becomes the standard on how a game is 'meant to be played'.

When you design a game that is supposed to have a diverse cast like overwatch has expected to objectively keep every character as useful as the next, you're working against the very reason why you had character variety. People will more often then not just keep choosing the characters that bring the best results because it's their best shot at earning money and a win. When you're job is to win, it makes the premise of choice very watered down, because if you don't pick what you team demands of you and your team looses, your at fault for that loss because your team didn't want you to be that character.

Just like the others have said, Esports seems to have sucked all of the fun out of gaming.

Personally, I find the best example of this is with Halo: Infinite and the previous games in the series.

For example, what is the point of the Plasma Pistol?

Removing it's EMP ability, but maintaining it's abysmal damage, has rendered the thing completely useless in a multiplayer setting. Sure, it can pop shields still, but that an be more easily achieved with any other gun.

The job of EMPing vehicles has been moved to the Disrupter and Shock Rifle, which can't do it in one hit which means the primes targets (Tanks and Aircraft) can kill you before you stun them. The only other way is through a rare grenade that moves erratically once thrown.

Why do we have the Commando rather than a DMR?

It's worse at close range than a Assault Rifle, worse at medium range than a Battle Rifle and can't be used effectively at long range. The Pulse Carbine is arguably the long range version of general-purpose weaponry, but works better at medium range due to having a much bigger ammo capacity.

Why do we have the Sentinel Beam and Ravager?

The role they fulfil is so niche, that they might as well have been replaced with something much more generalist, like the Grenade Launcher or SAW.

The fundamental cause of this issue is that they have all been designed with Esports in mind. This means you cannot have weapons that cross purposes and you have to have a weapon that can have an advantage in every conceivable scenario, regardless of how rare or niche it might be.

This also bleeds over into the map design, as you cam then no longer create artistic or novel maps, as everything has to conform to the arena concept and balanced to the guns you placed on the map.

This is why I've stopped playing until Forge comes out. While there is nothing wrong with the game, and as a competitive shooter I do find it a lot of fun, but the experience quickly grows stale as you find yourself taking the same efficient paths through specific maps, using the same weapons and getting into the same fights over and over and over again.

Nothing spontaneous or stupid happens anymore. It's all become far too clinical for my tastes.