Who the hell would watch Civ played as an e-sport?
Don't you need an audience to make an e-sport happen?
To be fair, in order to make an e-sport happen you need both an audience (of gamers who play, understand, and enjoy the game) AND mechanics that facilitate making the game fun to watch. It's not enough to simply build a fun game if your publisher or investor aim is to build an e-sport game, it's not even enough to simply pursue a genre that currently has popular e-sport entries (especially because said genres will often be saturated already and you will need additional development time, marketing and sponsorship investment, and design changes in order to peel off players from existing entries that already are e-sports).
To facilitate a watchable long-term e-sport (as opposed to just a novel stream) game, IMO, you need:
- readability of gameplay intent and moves, so that players can jump into a stream and engage by following along (without having to solely rely on streamer or caster explanation)
- reasonably complex mechanics to make gameplay interesting to watch over and over
- transparency and skill-indexing of the mechanics to make gameplay predictable enough that players will be engaged by the abilities and execution of the streamer they are watching
- short, satisfying gameplay loops which regularly pique audience interest moment-to-moment, to avoid them getting bored while awaiting the execution of a longer-term strategy
- engaging but not overwhelming graphics and sound, to allow the audience to watch the stream for long periods of time without getting mentally tired or bored
So if your question is "who would watch Civ as a sport???" implying that Civ is obviously not a game that meets many of the above criteria, a natural response by a publisher or investor might be "what needs to change in Civ to make it a viable e-sport opportunity?"
And while some of Civ 7's design clearly could be read as intending to target the e-sports demographic, I would argue Civ has actually been clearly and consistently moving AWAY from any e-sports potential it had (not that it had very much in the first place) since its *earlier* franchise entries. Most of the design changes made to Civ 7, whether you like them or not, are clearly meant to engage multiplayer as a way to sell more DLC and possibly microtransaction content, not necessarily using multiplayer as a launch platform for e-sports content.
Civ 5 introduced the culture slotting minigame and government policy trees and Civ 6 built on that by making government policies swappable, adding to the culture minigame with national parks and rock bands, and un-centralizing cities with districts. These all make for compelling gameplay, but it's gameplay that drags out each individual turn planning and mini-gaming. Civ 7 continues in this direction by deepening government policies with civ-exclusive cards, making yield maximization literally part of at least one age victory objective, and adding mid-game decision making in the form of age-switching and civ-switching.
The more gameplay systems Civ tacks on or deepens, the less watchable the game is as a competitive stream. There's simply too much thinking time and not enough satisfying per-turn gameplay loops (unless you can derive satisfaction purely from watching numbers go up, which is... very few people outside of the 4X/grand strategy genre, probably) to make tuning into competitive Civ something that can compete with a MoBA or shooter. There's a reason that Paradox strategy games, despite being lucrative in DLC and having great Youtube viewership numbers, do TERRIBLE numbers on Twitch (all their latest games are doing <500 viewers on a Saturday afternoon/evening US time when the big titans are doing 50-100k viewer numbers).
Not that the games are complex enough to do numbers as-is, but Civ3 and Civ4's gameplay mechanics being so limited on a turn-by-turn basis (your government switches are significant and only occur a few times a game, there's no culture minigames, the map gameplay is simplified to stack combat and worker/settler movement) and thus allowing for turns to go by quickly once your strategy is set (which is the bane of a PLAYER but actually allows for a viewer to remain engaged as moment-by-moment gameplay is much faster) make for a game that's reasonably watchable (if dated in its gameplay) as long as you run it on the fastest speed and set up the rules for small map sizes and single-city elimination.
