Because it's more popular overall

more entertaining

easier to follow

Ball in the goals.
Guy runs to end zone.
Puck in the net.
Batted home.

Try to think far ahead and imagine Quake being played on internet-tv in a bar, and imagine people interested and entertained. Can you imagine it being ctf?

Your problem is that you're looking at this from a very narrow perspective and completely ignoring the bigger picture and larger goal of pushing QL onto other people.

If you didnt realize it then it's like trying to explain to someone that 9/11 really did happen to someone who never pays attention to the world's news and politics and lives in the woods but keeps pretending the towers are standing still...

ESL hosts Euro TDM nations cup:
[...]
North and south americans don't watch the live stream or the vod's because they prefer ctf.
[...]

ESL hosts Euro CTF nations cup:
[...]
North and South americans watch because they like CTF and because ESL is well known and enjoyed by all.

If the U.S. had several world class football teams who's matches were aired worldwide, then maybe you would have a legitimate analogy. But since nobody is interested in americans playing football, that's a retarded comparison.

The extra bit was added to my sentence because of the fact that ESL has a dedicated viewer base built in. They're not just some random stream that airs matches for a specific community, they have people coming to their site on a regular basis in order to watch the latest matches.

The point is that Americans that play CTF and watch ESL will watch a euro ctf cup but they wont watch a euro tdm cup.

euros prefer to watch TDM because YOU play TDM, if CTF was more active than TDM then YOU would prefer to watch CTF.

What he is trying to say is that CTF is more interesting for people who play little to none quake, but might be interested in seeing the matches (a cs player might check esl-tv and see some quake going on, CTF would seem to him like a better gametype than TDM)

, and also CTF would be viewed by euros AND americans (both north and south), while TDM would only be viewed by euros.

Yes its a european tournament for european players and european spectators, but if you want to push the boundaries of quake as an international "sport" CTF would probably be a better choice.

Everybody understand CTF, even people who don't play video games.

But people from other games look at TDM and go "what's the point?" The other thing you're missing is entertainment value. Without any real objective, people have trouble getting excited about a match. The most exciting point in any real sport is when a team scores. Can you imagine what football would be like if there were no nets and teams won and lost depending on how well they passed the ball to each other?

But you're not going to be able to force anybody else to enjoy your preferred gametype.