This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

　　Trevor 'Midway' Schmidt is an industry veteran with over twelve years of experience as an esports professional. His resume includes the attendance of over 150 LAN events on four different continents, the founding of and role as Editor-in-Chief at GotFrag, and helping Major League Gaming start their PC operations. Today Trevor is the co-founder of DOTABUFF and ELOBUFF and manages Electronic Sports League's North American operations.

　　If you are in the esports industry and would like to write a guest blog for onGamers, please reach out to gosustrolling or kimrom on Twitter.

　　Editor's noteI spent my school years playing every sport known to man. American football? Yep. Soccer, or real football to Euros? Yep. Basketball, wrestling, golf, and lacrosse? Yep, yep, yep, and yep. The only sport I really ever loved, though, was Baseball. I played it year around, got lessons from semi-professional players and traveled all over the USA to get better, all of which allowed me to play for my University team.

　　One thing playing baseball taught me? You could not pay someone to watch my high school team play.

　　Every week I’d step out onto the field and look at the stands curious to see who would show up. It was the same people, week after week. I could have taken a picture of the faces that arrived and compared from each week to next, and they would not have change. Those same people often sat in the same location with their synthetic-metal folding lawn chairs.

　　Move forward fifteen years and take into account all of esports events I’ve attended. I feel like the picture is taking shape again. Esports seems to feature the same faces at each esports event, and the only thing that seems to have changed is the quality of the chair. The question that stirs in my head is: can we break out of this or does it even matter if we can’t?

　　Let me pose a simple connection. Fans are only fans if they play the game or have a connection to the players playing in the game. I posted this on Twitter a while back and got a crazy amount of feedback on it. Two different bloggers wrote about the tweet and I was flooded with responses from people. It seems people find it controversial to say that esports is limited by these two factors. Let’s focus on the biggest esport in the current esports community, League of Legends.

　　@keekerdc @AlphaFerg Baseball has become like WoW, SC2 or CS, you have to love it and be #passionate about it to watch

　　— Trevor Schmidt (@gfmidway) October 31, 2013

　　League of Legends numbers are getting crazy stupid at this point. It was widely reported that the World Championships recently saw 32 million viewers with a peak of 8.2 million viewers at one time. Maybe it’s going against those numbers but I think 99% of those people are either LoL players, esports fans with a connection to LoL or someone related/directly connected to the players playing in the match. The avenues to watch are primarily if not entirely relient on a media that caters to players who play LoL. You watch on Twitch.tv, YouTube, or in the game's client itself.

　　Now let me be clear, this isn’t a bad thing. Riot wants people to play League of Legends. I just think there is a disconnect between hardcore esports fans and the reality of who cares about esorts. There is a large group of people who believe that since they care about LCS, everyone cares about LCS. They take this a step further often and say, “You put LCS on TV, millions of new people will watch because it’s REALLY COOL!” It is really cool but why would my Grandfather who watches Foxnews 24/7 switch to LCS on ESPN? Trust me, it's not happening.

　　But this is where I think people need to calm down and consider what our expectations are. Do we really NEED people who don’t care about gaming to watch esports for us to be successful? Hell no. Five years ago, DirecTV, a massive satellite television provider in the United States, created a new league with News Corp called the Championship Gaming Series. The Championship Gaming Series had eighteen teams spread out in USA, Europe, Brazil, Mexico, China, South East Asia and Australia. All these teams played in seasons to reach a World Championship called CGS. Sound Familiar?

　　Now CGS cared primarily about getting non-gamers to watch gamers play esports in 4 different games. I watched them change the rules of each of the four games to appeal to non-gamers; they sped things up, reduce complexity and reduce importance. The CGS leadership admitted to it. CGS bombed out after two seasons by spending too much money and not achieving the interest necessary to sustain itself.

　　Why is LCS different? Because Riot understands what esports really is.

　　In an interview with Games Industry, Riot CEO Brandon Beck told them, getting non-players to watch is "not a priority." Marc Merrill, President and cofounder of Riot Games, backed up Beck’s statement with his often used quote.

　　"We lose a lot of money on e-sports, it’s not something, currently, that we do to drive return or profitability or whatnot. It's bringing value to our players. Maybe, down the road, that will change. This is something that we believe, as a company, philosophically, if we bring value to our players, they'll reward us with engagement," said Merrill to the Associated Press.

　　Riot’s focus is clear: esports is engagement or retention tool for its League of Legends player base. They don’t care about getting your grandparents to watch. For this I applaud them. Because it’s the wrong approach and WONT WORK. If I could point to one thing that makes Riot’s esports successful, beyond the insane amount of cash they spend, it would be this attitude. They care about their players who play the game, not the mainstream media.

　　So why can’t the rest of the esports community catch up to Riot in this feeling? Why does the esports community always feel we can make people care about what we care about?

　　Well you can always try paying people to come watch my high school baseball team. It will probably be just as successful as paying ESPN or USA network to air your esports.