One of the biggest differences between tournaments and cash games is your investment versus your return.
Bad beats aside, every player is guaranteed a significant amount of playing time in a well-structured tournament. The large ratio of starting chips to blinds allows every player to start as a deep stack.
The only monetary investment made in a tournament is the original buy-in. Bad beats aside, you are guaranteed to see a large number of hands for the price of entry.
In a cash game, with each chip being worth face value, the same investment can't guarantee you nearly as many hands.
The attraction of having a set maximum loss makes tournaments attractive to weaker players, who are not comfortable with the amount of money they may lose playing a cash game, or casual players who don't want to invest a large sum of money into a
bankroll. This is one of the reasons a tournament will have an average lower quality of players overall than most cash games.
For a $100 buy-in to a large tournament, the winner stands to make upward of $8,000, depending on the size of the field and the payout structure.
Any player can have a spectacular day where everything works out for them. On one of these days, a player stands to win 80 times the original investment.
In a cash game, you'd be lucky if the same type of fantastic day made you 20 times your original investment.