Namely in fighting games, I’ve noticed that bracket seeding is often determined prior to the tournament through rankings — but, why not let it be randomized? What difference does a seeded and non seeded tournament make?
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So one major argument is, as others have mentioned, about making the tournament more exciting (for the viewers *and* for the competitors, who theoretically face harder and harder opponents in each successive round). Another is that, in a tournament of skill or ability, the “proper” outcome is for the most skilled competitor to get first place, the second most skilled competitor to get second place, and so on, including having the worst skilled competitors score last. It turns out that arranging brackets by seeding* is the best way to make that happen.
Imagine a 64-player fighting game tournament. The “proper” outcome, if we perfectly knew everyone’s skill level, is for the worst 32 players to get eliminated in round 1 (for simplicity, let’s pretend it’s single-elimination for now, although double-elim tournaments have the same issues). The way to make that outcome happen is to match each of the “worst 32” competitors against someone from the upper 32. If, at any point, you match two of the “upper 32” players against each other, then one of them must necessarily be eliminated, and some other match, which ends up being two players from “worst 32”, will qualify one of those “worse” players to round 2.
In the most extreme case, the seed 1 and seed 2 players might play each other in round one, causing the second most skilled player to actually take last place. This is an outcome which is at odds with the purpose of the tournament (that is, for players to place according to their relative skill). Also, depending on the prize scheme (e.g. second place prize), there could be actual financial impact on the players. So, to prevent this, brackets are arranged by seeding (and occasionally a few other minor factors).
* Seeding is supposed to be based on a measurement of skill. In an ideal world, seeding would reflect a competitor’s true skill with complete accuracy. In practice, this is obviously impossible to get perfectly right. Also, for very large tournaments, it’s often too much work to evaluate and seed every competitor. In those cases, a tournament might only seed a certain number of top competitors, and everyone else just ends up in an “unseeded” category.
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