Your mxsing up popularity with a competitive minded game. Let's look at all of these:
CoD - I don't know much about this game, but from what I can tell, it doesn't seem to be made to be competitive, just that it is one of the most popular games this generation. I do know 2 had problems with camping. CoD success has more to do with it being a well made shooter that used a setting no one was using. Previous CoD games were good, but used the tired WW2 setting. Once they broke out of it, the game succeeded. Tournaments for this game were due to popularity. Halo had a good showing at MLG. Then they made Halo Reach which seems like a competitive minded game to me (they were trying to do Halo 1 again, so there is that.)
Starcraft - Starcraft was always an easy RTS when it came out. When many games uses up to 8 different resources, Starcraft consolidated it down to 2. Starcraft 2 was specifically made for the Esports crowd and is balanced around them. If you compare sales between territories where both games came out, Starcraft 1 sold better. It grew in Korea due to PC Cafes where it was a mainstay there. The scene grew because it was popular. When it tried to please the eSports crowd, it faltered. HotS tried to alleviate the issue by adding unranked matches.
WoW - WoW was always an easy MMO. MMOs before WoW were very time sink heavy and only appealed to a limited crowd. WoW tried not to infringe on the player's life and made the game easier to get into. The game does rested EXP (extra EXP for not playing) and bonus EXP with friends. You could also play for free up to LV 20 with a friend (something like that). WoW was one of the most popular games released. The community grew out of it being popular. Even still, it doesn't have a big pone and it beaten out for other games like the shooters, Starcraft and fighting games.
LoL - LoL succeeded because it made the genre easier. Anyone in MOBAs will tell you that. One example is the removal of denying. Another is that items are not as ******** and you can't become a one man wrecking machine as a result. It is also streamed line so that new players can get in easier. It's the most played game in the world. As such, it has the biggest tournaments. The game has 32 million active players. If 1 percent of the community cares at all about competitive LoL, that would be 320,000 people. If it was 10 percent, that is 3.2 million people. That is biggest than any other competitive community and it is due to pure number of people and not because the game is designed to cater to that player base. If anything, it is the opposite. I remember reading a thread about Riot nerfing a character because it was giving new players trouble. But I digress....
The reason those games have larger competitive communities is because they are larger in general. But by design, they do not specifically cater to an eSports player base. When games do, they will lose sales and become smaller games. Street Fighter 2 was a phenomenon when it came out and sold 6 million on the SNES (which is impressive for it's time as the SNES had poor sales in Europe). This is also not counting arcades. As the series went on, it catered to eSports players. A game has yet to top Street Fighter 2. But here comes Sakurai who specifically makes a fighting game that is easier to play. 64 sells over 5 million, Melee sells over 7 million, and Brawl sells over 11 million which trumps every other fighting game out there. Starcraft 2 declined when it went for the eSports crowd. Dota 2 is a more "competitive" game but loses to LoL which is n00b friendly. Awesomenauts is declining as it caters more to eSports players.
It's OK to have competitive players. In fact, it's great to see fans who are so dedicated. But they should not be the focus of development. When games make the games for a smaller eSports fanbase, it shrinks the player base and sales drop. This is why the design should be for making the game user friendly and open rather than catering to a small eSpots crowd. This goes for online too since it is a key element in multiplayer games today.
Your argument wasn\t if a game was designed to be simpler or if it was designed to be complex, your argument was whether or not a game with a known higher level of play can become popular/
Games aren't born popular you cannot use the the argument that a game has a big community because it is popular, that makes no sense/. You can say that out of all of those games Starcraft 2 was successful because of its predecessors popularity but I said Starcraft in general which basically erases that point.
I cannot speak immensely about shooters but I have played every other game I mentioned very, very extensively and here is where you are wrong.
WoW was never designed as an easier MMO. It had a much simpler UI and it was easier to get into because of the theme and the easy to perform quests yet raiding was never designed to be easy or simple, bosses would have 1 shot abilities that would wipe you if 1-3 out of 40 players made a mistake. WoW started being designed as a casual game around WotLK, do you know what else happened at WotLK? WoW for the first time has a decline in the increase ratio of players. No I am not saying subscribers decline, that was not it, but as soon as the casual experience started WoW started gaining less amount of new subscribers. TBC is seen as the pinnacle of WoW history and guess what, it was the Expansion that was designed for hardcores, with harder raiding, the introduction of arenas and the balancing of CC and burst. TBC was designed for high play and it remains on almost every WoW player\s history as the best WoW expansion, although many people see IceCrown Patch as the best instance ever, and guess what LK was also designed to not be killed by casuals for a lot of months, after which they decided to nerf ICC and give players buff so they could live the content.
Starcraft got famous due to its great balance and its major ability to allow for strategic thought and freedom. I remember, I was there. Starcraft was so popular due to how much strategic thinking it allowed you to do. Most RTS had 4-5 resources, not 8 and Starcraft has 3 not 2 (Population is a resource, building Overlords, Pylons or Supply Depots its also a part of the game), you might theorize that this made the game simpler and allowed a bigger audience to enjoy the RTS genre, but this was not why Stacraft remains strong to this day or is taught at Korean Schools as a sport, this is all due to its huge ability to be played at higher levels, while most other RTS had a specific strategy, race or unit that was just vastly superior or optimal for a certain situation, Starcraft was all around checking your opponent and countering his moves. Starcraft also has much harder techs like Macroing and Microing.
League of Legends purposely removed things like denying and losing gold upon dying making the game easier. Yet making something simpler does not mean it is not played at a high level. Let us remember that your argument was that games that purposely allow the ability to be played at high levels are not successful. LoL, even though it simplified a wide variety of things to appeal to a less technical crowd of casuals, started a big campaign to promote high level play in its own game. Every time a champion is reworked the community is highly involved and professional players are often asked to give advice about why or why not a character works. In most cases a champion is looked at what exploits can a high level player perform. When a champion is nerfed because of troubles to new players it is normally nerfed to the ground and never picked by any professional player. Riot then tries to rework the character and give it completely new mechanics around high level play!
Just to make you understand better, when Season 3 hit they tried to improve a certain champion class by reducing the cost of damage. This ended up buffing other certain classes and so they hit these classes by augmenting another stat cost, speed. This caused a shift in the high level metagame making pros switch the order of their builds, and when coupled with players who actually knew how to poke and when/how to engage this became a bit more powerful than expected. As such they introduced a stream of new champions with integrated hard engages and offensive playstyles, what this caused is a general nerf to the overpowered class as now there were many more champions who could counter them much easier. This was all due to competitive play!
What I am trying to explain is that League's campaign to make the game played at a high level is actually what made it so popular, don\t believe me? I actually surveyed people at the S2 world finals which was at my university while waiting on a 2 hour line for a Ryze and Tryndamere conmemorative statue. Guess what? From around 60 players surveyed, more than half of them had never played more than a few dozen games (level 10 or less), they just watched streams. I started this survey because I was amazed at how many sub 8 year old kids and over 40 year old parents were mixed in the crowd.
What I mean is that more people watch the game than the people who actually play it. The game has achieved a popularity no other video game has achieved before and it is all just because of its huge 2-3 year campaign to make it playable at a high level.
Fact is you can make an argument that Smash is the LoL of Fighting Games, there are many similarities in both approaches as both games made their genre much simpler to understand and to actually play. But Smash does not have an online play option, Smash does not have a free to play structure (which LoL also made popular), Smash is not playable on a platform owned by almost every household on the world (A PC) and Smash does not have an active High Level Play campaign which tries to convince everyone that the game is very deep, good to analyze, fun to play and exhilarating to watch at a competitive level.
Note how this campaign is all about competitive level and its what gives LoL its huge popularity.
Edit: Your biggest mistake is that you think Competitive Depth and complexity are the same thing when in fact they are not.
The biggest example I can think of is Pokemon. I bet you have played it too. Do you see how simple the game is? Yet can you grasp how deep the strategic thinking and the overall gameplay can be if played with a high level mentality?
Go look up what EV is, or move tutoring through hatching eggs, or the Pokemon's native IV\s. What about simpler things like which 4 attacks to give your pokemon, it can be as simple as just choosing 4 attacks you like, it could be as strategic as choosing the 4 attacks which cover the most weaknesses possible while still having a STAB (look it up) with both of your pokemon's types or it can even be as complex as knowing the most popular pokemon choices and choosing attacks which coupled with your pokemons stats allow him to serve a specific niche you want him to. Like a Tanky Spike pokemon or a Really fast Baton Passer.
There is an incredibly wide varierty of depthness in pokemon it really austounds me. Yet the game is incredibly simple to pick up, beat it and never even find out about things like EV or STABS. (weaknesses are clearly stated in the game so that one is a given).
I know this for a fact, I played Pokemon Red and Silver and had no idea of any of these and I discovered STABS by myself on Sapphire. I didn/t know about EVs until some friends decided to throw a 16 man tournament and one of my best friends actually told me that his fully SP. Def. W/E wouldn't be killed by my W/E\s Thunder. I asked him if he meant that he just caight a lot of that specific pokemon and took the one with the highest SP, Def value and he responded by saying those were IVs and he meant EVs and then explained to me what they were.
From there I learned a lot more about when or how to use Pokemon for their stats and not for their learned moves or type duos,.
So to summarize a game can be both simple and have a High Level play competitive mindset.
This is why I normally oppose things I consider bad design like L-Cancelling (needing to press a button is bad design imo, I think it should just be automatic) and I advocate making things that add depth (like wave-dashing) have simpler inputs and easier to understand concepts (such as mapping it to one button, making your character take a decently spaced step forward or backwards and calling it something like Trotting). Things like this would make the game much simpler to understand and would have an easier execution barrier yet the competitive depth would remain almost untouched as long as all of its options still remained.
