Competitive games, the skill ceiling and floor

     What sets competitive games apart from other types of games? There are so many different types. There is shooters, role-playing, top-down, etc. They are all so drastically different and yet they can be classified as competitive as the best in the world fight for sometimes quite large amounts of money. To add on to this thought, why are the competitive games also the extremely popular games? What makes them appeal to the casual player just as much as the top-end professional.

I would consider the presence of the skill ceiling and the skill floor.

    We aren't building a skill based house no matter how architectural this sounds. These two terms refer to the accessibility of a particular game. The skill ceiling represents exactly how much potential a game has when played by a professional. In other words, if a person pilots the game mechanics perfectly, how much more effective are they than someone who is a complete beginner? On the flip side, the skill floor represents the bare minimum that it takes to be effective in that game.

    From the graph, the player's skill increases as time moves to the right, they become more effective as they understand the mechanics better and better. Moving back to the original idea, the logical conclusion is that games with really high skill ceilings must be more competitive and thus more popular. While it is true that professionals prefer a high ceiling, this does not cater to the rest of the population. Take Starcraft for example, it is notorious for being the highest skill ceiling of any game available. It also fell off the map probably never to return to mainstream consumption. Its problem was not the ceiling but the floor.

    The barrier to entry into Starcraft is incredibly high. The amount of actions, pace of the game, and the interactions of all the moving pieces create a tangled web that only the most dedicated can understand. For this game, Starcraft has a very high skill floor.

    In order for a game to be competitive, it has to have both a high skill ceiling and a low skill floor. It must be interesting enough for the professionals but easy enough to start for any Internet denizen. This sounds like a simple enough idea, but in the realm of game design this is one of the hardest tasks imaginable. A game that is complex enough to allow plenty of skill expression and basic enough to understand how to play the game immediately. Any deviation from a high ceiling and low floor is enough to make a game fall into disuse.

A incomplete list but enough to get the point across, here lies the graveyard of the dead or dying games that could not hit that happy medium:

Starcraft

Heroes of the Storm

Quake

Crossfire

Alliance of Valiant Arms

Smite

PUBG

World of Tanks

    To be fair to World of Tanks, they didn't die because of a problem aforementioned, they died due to micro transactions plaguing the entire game. 

C'est la vie.