You can think of events as notifications that contain additional data for the notified services to process. There is, however, another way to think of them: a change of state. Think how easy it would be to debug issues with your application logic if you'd be able to know the state in which it was when the bug occurred and what change was requested of it. That's one benefit of event sourcing. In essence, it captures all the changes that happen to the system by simply recording all the events in the sequence they happened.
Often, you'll find that the service no longer needs to persist its state in a database, as storing the events somewhere else in the system is enough. Even if it does, it can be done asynchronously. Another benefit that you derive from event sourcing is a complete audit log for free:
