Indeed, things like Guitar Hero have been featured alongside counter-strike and CoD, which I can't help but raise an eyebrow at, but I seem to be detecting an intense amount of... ignorance perhaps, in your previous statements. You seem to think that unless a game draws in tens of millions of dollars annually, and is a hit with the mainstream world, its competitive scene couldn't possible be anything short of ridiculous. Seems rather arrogant and condescending to me, who exactly are you to judge what does and doesn't qualify? What I really find amusing though, is that you mention CoD as if any release since CoD3 hadn't actually had shallow gameplay, and therefore been equally as ridiculous as the above.
Really, I think you need to widen your perspective a bit. Perhaps you should take a look at
Quake, Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Marvel vs Capcom, Darkstalkers, Natural Selection. Perhaps you'd like the opposite,
Fury, a game that have a massive competitive following through beta, proceeded to hold a pre-release competition (which my team won), with a staggering 100,000+ participants and sponsors from big name companies such as nVidia and Intel(My team alone won more than $6,000 in prizes, myself around $500 worth). Then, to show how little your competitive following prior to release matters, the game went on to become one of the greatest failures the competitive gaming scene has ever had.
