The most common games being played competitively include League of Legends and Call of Duty, but there are some truly niche games with intense competitors:
- Catherine is a game developed by the people who brought us Persona, and it has seen a wide range of reception since its release in 2011. The story is centered around a guy attempting to form a relationship with one of two women. You solve block puzzles to progress in the game, and in multiplayer mode, you’re racing against your opponent to get to the top of the puzzle first.
- GeoGuessr: Potentially one of the least likely games to ever come to mind when discussing esports, GeoGuessr is all about looking at the street-level view of a map. The closer you get to correctly guessing where you’ve been dropped in the map, the more points you earn. It’s a casual game that allows you to explore the world through gameplay, with single and multiplayer modes.
- Age of Empires was first released in 1997, with multiple iterations of the title having since been developed. A real-time strategy game that places you in the Stone Age and has you build your own civilization from scratch, the game on its own doesn’t seem like a highly competitive concept. However, each game in the series has inspired tournaments to see who can build the strongest Empire.
- Farming Simulator was released in 2008 and is still going strong, with new games being added to the series roughly every two to three years. The gameplay is literally what the title suggests: simulated high-yield farming.
- Zwift is an online cycling and running game that allows people to train and race one another virtually. Logically, cycling and running are physical sports, so transferring to esports is reasonable.
- OSU!: Plenty of music and rhythm games are played competitively, but OSU! has a unique and passionate fanbase attending tournaments. The game is free-to-play and has over 19 million active players.
- Shaq Fu: Starring basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, Shaq Fu is a fighting game from EA in the mid-90s. In its time, it wasn’t well-received, making it all the more confusing it found a rebirth in competitive gameplay.
- Dead By Daylight is a 4v1 multiplayer where players are assigned a role in a horror story – either as the killer or one of the potential victims trying to evade death. Due to the nature of the game, it lends itself well to competitive play that’s fun to watch or participate in.
- Shrek SuperSlam had a strong following in the mid-2000s. A fighting game featuring the characters from the Shrek films, up to four people can play at once.
- Turbo Racing League is a free-to-play mobile game based on the 2013 DreamWorks film Turbo about a snail obsessed with becoming a pro racer. The game gained most of its popularity due to DreamWorks working with Verizon to create a series of tournaments as a promotion for the movie.
