I wrote this a long time ago as a script for a short video. It is missing more recent things I have thought of so is not a complete picture (of my view of this), but it gets 80% of the point across. Enjoy!
A lot of people have speculated and made videos on why trackmania isn’t a very big esport, and this isn’t going to be a fully fleshed out essay about that, but I wanted to share an opinion I have on an aspect tm esports that I feel doesn’t really get paid much attention.
So, the first thing to understand and the core of what leads me to my position, is that tm has no player interaction. The cars obviously have no collision, and so what you do really has no direction impact on what your opponent is doing. It is still a competition because whoever completes the track the fastest wins, but there is no player interaction. Now, player interaction doesn’t necessarily need to take the form of combat or driving around other cars, for example I would even consider something like lockout bingo in a game like minecraft to have some amount of player interaction even if the players do not end up actually fighting each other during the match. If you don’t understand what I mean by this, in lockout bingo both players are given 25 objectives, and the first person to complete 13 wins, the catch is that when one player completes an objective it is locked off for the other player. This leads to players trying to order the objectives they go for in response to what their opponent is doing and what they anticipate their opponent to do in the future. Some versions of bingo also include a compass that points to the opposing team or player, which allows you to directly disrupt them if you think that is your best option. This is somewhat abstract and maybe not that interesting if the caster doesn’t explain what is happening properly, but it’s at least something, unlike tm which has almost zero player interaction.
As far as I can tell most if not all other esports have significant and easily understandable player interaction, whether its rocket league, cs go, league of legends, starcraft, chess, or whatever else. Now, why do I think this is important. The gameplay of trackmania matches almost entirely boils down to who can do the same thing but better, occasionally there are slightly different lines that have a bit of risk reward, but overall players are just trying their best to do the same thing as their opponent’s, but do it slightly faster. Trackmania is all skill and no strategy, and this leads to casts essentially just being filled with play by play shoutcasting of what is happening on the screen. I suspect it’s not particularly interesting after a while to watch this, unless you are already invested in the game itself and care about the players. There isn’t much else going on on these casts, and really I don’t think there is much more they could talk about even. The one thing there is to go off of is that there is actually a tiny amount of player interaction when it comes to how much you risk, but playing safe often just looks like driving slower unless you know the intent behind it, which is hard to pick out in the moment as a viewer or caster unless someone on the opposing team literally crashes and so obviously you are more free to drive a bit safer. But yeah that’s pretty much all there is when it comes to player interaction, and personally I think it makes it a lot less interesting to watch. Because this is a major point where trackmania is different from other esports, I believe it may serve as at least a partial answer for this whole mystery of oooh why isn’t trackmania bigger in the esports scene? Maybe this also points out why racing games in general never really got anywhere as esports, since esports is primarily a viewing experience and the depth is pretty much lost on anyone who doesn’t care about and understand it, and the people who do understand would rather watch real life racing.
More: TM Theory