Single-player games deserve more attention in esports

If you look at the top tier of competitive gaming, it feels like a total team sport monopoly. The biggest heavyweights in the industry pull in staggering numbers, and almost every single one of them relies on a full squad to get the job done.

Take a look at the viewership metrics. League of Legends racked up over 735 million hours watched in 2025 alone, while Counter-Strike 2 pushed past 584 million hours. The Cologne peaked at 2,752,353 viewers earlier this year, becoming the most-watched Counter-Strike tourney in history. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang casually dropped a massive peak of 5.6 million concurrent viewers during its championship cycle, and titles like VALORANT, Dota 2, and Rocket League regularly command massive broadcast footprints.

There is a very clear reason why team-based titles dominate the charts. They mimic traditional sports. You get to root for a club, buy into team rivalries, buy jersey merch, and watch insane five-man strategies come together in real time.

But in our obsession with team synergy, we are sleeping on the most raw, high-stakes form of competition in gaming: single-player esports.

When you step onto a stage in a 1v1 title or a solo speedrun, there is no safety net. There is no team captain to call a timeout, no teammate to trade a kill, and no bench player to swap in when you are having an off day.

It is just you, your opponent, and a screen.

That isolation creates an intensity that team games simply cannot replicate. Think about fighting games like Street Fighter, Tekken, or Super Smash Bros, or the high-stress world of competitive speedrunning.

Every single input is a high-wire act. When a player makes a mistake in a solo esport, they carry 100% of the blame. That single dropped combo or missed frame skip haunts them, and you can see the visible weight of it on their face in the player cam. That level of vulnerability makes the victories taste incredible and the defeats feel absolutely devastating.

While events like Evo and Combo Breaker showcase the passion and determination of these single player pros, I think of things like the Kemonomichi Legends LIVE that pitted Saul Leonardo “MenaRD” Mena II against Daigo Umehara. The Japanese fighting game fans took this very seriously, even comparing it to a sword fight to the death. Only one person comes out alive.

That is how serious the FGC gets. These two players trained for months before this, understanding the severity and importance of this first-to-ten event. During an interview, MenaRD told me: “It’s one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. At the end of the day, it was really important because I wanted to be at a level that would challenge him and be worth his time. He was also preparing. It made me really happy that it was worth it.”

This is a totally different vibe from what you get in League of Legends or Call of Duty, with smoke billowing as players march onto the stage together, while the commentators scream as if they’re in a soccer broadcast… It’s wild and fun, but it’s not a fight to the death. It’s likely why the FGC takes itself so seriously: there may not be as much money on the line, but they are still putting their souls on the stage, collapsing and crying at a loss, throwing a chair at a win…

Team rivalries are fun, but solo rivalries are pure narrative gold. In a team game, rosters change constantly. Players get traded, contracts expire, and by next season, the heated feud between two organizations feels like a corporate marketing campaign.

In single-player games, rivalries stay personal for years. You are staring directly across the stage at the exact person who knocked you out of the bracket six months ago. It is purely about proving who is better. There is no shifting the blame onto a bad support player or bad communication. That dynamic breeds a level of sweat, passion, and relentless self-improvement that makes for the best storylines in all of gaming.

The back-and-forth intensity between Juan “Hungrybox” DeBiedma and Joseph “Mang0” Marquez was next-level entertainment. It wasn’t just mindblowing to watch their faces as they competed on stage. They were taking jabs at each other online (and not funny sky messages and corny memes, like real heat). Reddit threads were dedicated to comparing them, bashing the other… It’s a level of intensity that would never be seen in Rocket League or VALORANT.

An old Reddit thread explained: “Mang0 Hbox is the most storied active rivalry. It’s actually so sick how long they have been going. At this point, I think their head-to-head record is the most important one in Melee history. When they are both retired, their H2H results will be poured over endlessly by the GOAT debate nerds.”

But there are so many more. I mean, Super Smash Bros. Melee is 20-plus years old. There has been plenty of time for incredible rivalries to form among OG players. Mang0 and Jason “Mew2King” Zimmerman were constantly one-upping each other, a duel between the analytical mind of Mew2King and the hypeman Mang0. They both created their own playstyle and had that old-school, veteran feel that made the matchups iconic.

And even new gen competitors have incredible storylines thanks to the game’s long history and the intensity of the 1v1 interactions on stage.

“Zain vs Cody is my favorite rivalry,” noted one Reddit user. “Neither is my favorite player, but literally every set between them feels like peak competitive Melee. I love how they keep pushing each other further and consistently trade both matches and sets, which means things are never boring when they meet in a bracket; I feel like a lot of other rivalries lack the sheer gravitas this one brings to the table.”

You have these incredible, super-long rivalries and storylines you just won’t get in team games. There is really no truly intense stage matchups that I can think of. As an esports journalist, I even remember asking Overwatch and League of Legends players who their greatest rivals were and stuff back in the day, and they really didn’t have much to say on that topic. Probably because that same person could end up on their team the next season. Yawn.

Playing at a championship level on your own demands a completely different tier of mental fortitude. You have to handle all the game sense, mechanics, clutch factor, and emotional regulation strictly inside your own head.

And it’s even harder to do that time and time again. Think Tekken 8 GOAT Arslan Ash, the Gods of Melee, and the 30-plus-year-old fighting game players who have to keep those mechanics and emotions at their peak for years, decades.

A speedrunner attempting a world record run at a major event is fighting their own nervous system while executing frame-perfect inputs for hours. A fighting game pro has to parse subtle animations in milliseconds to bait out a whiff punish, all while knowing a single wrong guess loses the game. It is raw, unadulterated human skill pushed to its absolute limits.

“When you are at a high level, you feel alone,” Arslan Ash admitted after winning his eighth Evo championship. “My friends aren’t even here. Your family is the one that always supports you. Real support. At the top, you’re alone. There’s just you and your family.”

Team games will always have their place at the top of the broadcasting mountain, and that is fine. But if we want competitive gaming to reach its peak as a spectator sport, it is time to start giving more respect, more broadcast budget, and more main-stage energy to the solo warriors holding it down all by themselves.