This week, we’re tackling a critical question: Why are traditional sports outlets retreating from esports? It’s a complex and often painful story, but one that holds the key to understanding the future of esports media.
Esports Media: A Reshaping Landscape
If you follow esports media, you’ve felt the chill and the changes. This year, we’ve seen the shuttering of Esports Illustrated and significant layoffs at theScore‘s esports division. This trend isn’t limited to shutdowns; it includes a wider reshaping of the landscape, with acquisitions of outlets like Dot Esports, Esports Insider, Esports News UK, and Esports.net, and the relaunch of Jaxon.
As an esports news publication ourselves, this is an especially personal topic to explore. But at The Esports Radar, we committed to covering the coverage itself. So today, we’re diving into the cold front hitting esports journalism and asking: is it a sector-wide/specific crisis, or a necessary market correction?
A Look Back: The “Golden” Era
To understand the present, we need to rewind to the late 2010s. Esports was almost universally declared “the future”. Projections pointed to a market on the verge of explosion, a belief materialised by high-profile launches like the Overwatch League and its multi-million dollar city-based franchise model, which drove sky-high valuations for team slots sold to the likes of Robert Kraft, the owner of the NFL franchise New England Patriots, and other big name investors, for reported sums of $20 million for each of the first 12 team slots, with reportedly even higher fees for the expansion team slots the following year.
Even though the Overwatch League move raised eyebrows and drew criticism even then for its inflated values for an unproven model in esports and with a brand new esport no less, it remains a good example of the optimism of those years. In turn, major players in media would not get left behind:
- In 2016, both ESPN and Yahoo Sports launched dedicated esports divisions.
- Also in 2016, Sky started covering esports on Sky Sports and joined ITV to invest in Ginx TV.
- In 2017, Daily Mail/Mail Online launched a dedicated esports coverage section.
- In 2018, Sports Business Journal acquired The Esports Observer.
- Across the decade, Globo‘s GE in Brazil and other local giants expanded their esports coverage.
- In 2019, Washington Post launched its esports vertical Launcher.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With lockdowns in place, digital entertainment became a primary pastime, and viewership numbers skyrocketed. Esports wasn’t just the future; it was the present. When the world reopened, viewership naturally retracted. But is this the simple explanation for the recent shutdowns?
While the post-lockdown cooldown affected the entire industry, it doesn’t fully explain why major outlets are abandoning esports news. The core issue runs deeper.
The Bigger Picture: An Industry-Wide Chill?
Before we continue, we must ask: is this cooling confined to esports media, or is it part of a broader pattern?
This context is crucial. It suggests that the recent shutdowns and consolidation in esports media are not a sign of any unique, fatal flaw, but rather part of a wider market correction and a push toward sustainable business models and a series of challenges across the news media landscape. The industry is not in an isolated crisis; it is maturing and confronting the same harsh financial realities that have always existed in the world of sports and entertainment.
Some examples of other major media outlets undergoing restructures and/or editorial layoffs include BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, Vice Media, TIME, Sports Illustrated and the LA Times, across 2023 to 2024.
The Business Case: When Niche is Nice
Ask yourself: where do you go for the latest Counter-Strike news? If you’re a dedicated fan, you go to HLTV or Dust2.us, not ESPN.
This highlights the first major misconception: there isn’t football, basketball, volleyball, and “esports”. There is football, basketball, volleyball, Counter-Strike 2, League of Legends, Rainbow Six, etc.—each with its own culture, news cycle, and fanbase.
At traditional sports and mainstream media outlets (see ESPN, theScore, the Mail Online) you had pre-existing wider reach, big news and some excellent coverage, but native outlets had the advantage of having a deeper connection with dedicated, passionate communities.
The second factor is pure business. A general division, even piling up all esports together, generally still doesn’t, for the time-being at least, drive the same audience volume as major ‘traditional sports’; see football, American football, basketball, tennis, hockey and cricket.
To illustrate, Esports Charts reported that the 2025 League of Legends World Championship (Worlds 2025) grand final reached about 6.7 million concurrent viewers. While a massive number for esports, it pales next to the average 17.5 million viewers for a regular-season NFL game. For a company in the traditional sports coverage vertical, esports was a niche segment pitted against and competing for internal recognition and resources against audience and advertising behemoths like the NFL, the NBA, the Premier League and more.
While specific internal P&L statements are not available, the decisive action to shut down the division might be evidence of this imbalance. The esports division, despite its audience and quality, might have been ultimately judged as a vertical that could not achieve the scale or profitability of their core sports verticals, leading to its termination.
That logic of “core business focus” goes even further when a parent company’s primary focus is misaligned. Penn Entertainment, theScore’s parent company since 2021 following an approximate $2 billion acquisition in cash and stock, has a direct focus on sports betting (see ESPNBet, theScore Bet) and casino operations. Cuts affected jobs in theScore beyond esports earlier this year, part of a significant internal restructuring. That logic can fit a case that occurred in Brazil with Game Arena: the esports news website was not the core business of its parent company, sportsbook Betnacional (majority owned by Flutter since September 2024), and was shut down only a few years after its launch.
But does this mean esports media is a failing business? Absolutely not. Look at the success of HLTV—acquired by Better Collective in 2020 for $34.5 million—and the continual growth of the community-driven, award-winning Liquipedia.
When Better Collective announced it would report HLTV’s results separately, the reason was clear: the site was performing so well that mixing it with the company’s wider inconsistent results didn’t make sense.
Here are the numbers that forced that decision:
- Generated €20 million (~$23.3M) in revenue in 2024, with a staggering 60% profitability margin.
- Averaged 350 million monthly page views and 26 million unique users over the past year.
- Hit a record 540 million page views in June 2025.
This proves that when esports is your core business, it can not only survive—it can thrive. However, a critical caveat is needed: A significant portion of HLTV’s remarkable revenue is facilitated by its integration with the Counter-Strike gambling sponsorship ecosystem. This is a unique advantage given its game focus (and the associated audience) which is not easily replicated by a site covering a different title.
The lesson isn’t that every niche site can be HLTV, but that deep community integration, adding real value to that community combined with a clearly defined revenue streams and ways to monetize without alienating one’s audience are essential.
To add some sobering context, compare HLTV’s success to another Better Collective property, FUTBIN (a stats platform for EA FC players, not explicitly focused on esports):
- 10 billion monthly impressions
- 4 billion page views
- Over 20 million unique monthly users
If these two sites were merged, HLTV’s massive numbers would almost seem irrelevant in the combined total.
This comparison drives a critical point home: the esports audience, while massive as a whole, is fragmented. Even a titan like HLTV represents just one segment of a vast gaming ecosystem. The takeaway isn’t that HLTV is small by any means, but that the “gaming” umbrella covers audiences of vastly different scales. When weighed against a platform like FUTBIN, which serves the colossal EA Sports FC player base, HLTV’s numbers, while impressive on their own, are put into perspective.
For a broader media company assessing where to allocate finite resources, investing in a niche that is itself a niche within a larger, more lucrative gaming world, can become a hard sell for traditional investors and executives.
By this, we mean the era of generalist sports media adding esports as a speculative, standalone vertical can be over. The path to sustainability for consumer/fan facing media seems to lie in a different approach: either the deep, community-embedded focus of a Liquipedia or HLTV, or the integration of esports into a broader, gaming-centric identity that also covers creators, influencers, and entertainment industry news, perhaps best exemplified by Dexerto.
This shift suggests that esports media is better placed to thrive not as an add-on to sports coverage, but as a core pillar of a digital-native strategy, exemplified by the success of dedicated outlets like business-focused outlet The Esports Advocate, and gaming and esports fandom-focused GosuGamers, alongside the sites mentioned above.
So the thought Heat Map brings is: while these shutdowns might point to a cold area for esports in generalist media, it’s overly simplistic to say outlets like theScore failed due to a lack of focus; they delivered great content for years. The deeper issue is a fundamental business model mismatch. Their esports division, while successful in producing quality content like an EVO documentary in August 2025, probably could not achieve the scale necessary to move the needle for the parent company’s primary revenue streams as priorities shifted following Penn’s takeover, and thus became one of the first in line when the company looked to make cuts.
This analysis was first published in the Heat Map newsletter on 27 November 2025. For early access to our analysis and more exclusive content, subscribe to The Esports Radar’s newsletters via this link.
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