Beyond opinions, there are facts, and I know my perspective may not be pleasant for everyone to read. But I think one thing that helps explain this phenomenon, which has happened in different games and eventually caught up with Gears years ago, is this: If a game is boring to play, it is usually boring to watch too. For years, Microsoft focused so heavily on building games around an official competitive esports scene that was never truly sustainable financially, and that priority on competition over the casual audience slowly pushed the core of the game further away from what made it special in the first place. At some point, esports viewership started declining even faster than the game itself was losing players. If esports ever comes back, it has to exist inside a healthy ecosystem built around entertaining the audience first. That means creating something people actually want to watch, something capable of sustaining a real audience before expecting a competitive scene to thrive around it. Look at it this way: teams competing against each other by itself will not create a healthy ecosystem. Having people who actually want to watch those teams compete will. The priority should not be the competitive players themselves. The priority has to be building a potential audience that genuinely wants to watch competitive players compete. And that requires a process. At the very least, the base game has to be fun to play first. Now more than ever, anyone who wants esports to exist will probably have to look for their own sponsors, build their own competitions, maybe even create their own platforms for that audience, and most importantly, generate a community that actually wants to consume those events. For years, I think too many people waited for The Coalition to create the financial conditions where players could make money simply because they were good at the game. But there is a reason the official Gears esports program ended in 2022. I’m not saying people should give up on esports. I’m saying we need to understand what the priority has to be first: the game needs active players who are actually having fun. The people who come home from work and want to play for a couple of hours are the ones who should be prioritized. Not the people who have enough time to play 15 hours a day. Building the game mainly around that audience is not sustainable, because eventually you just create a bubble.