They’re not a big e-sport in comparison to the lanes Riot runs in.
I love them to death, drove 80 miles out to a local last week, but I know it’s small-time. It’s part of the charm, especially when your game is something that is being kept alive entirely by community effort.
That said, I wasn’t impressed by the design of Rising Thunder- it was a SF4 clone in its gameplay, the gimmick was cooldowns (which is going to be in Granblue Fantasy Versus as well). The one thing it did well was netcode, and the main hope I’ve seen from folks is that it will drag Japanese devs kicking and screaming into making netplay up to American standards, and not Tokyo to Osaka standards.