Yeah go figure. They released the game early for the competitive scene and they endorse and contribute to a competitive circuit. Real monsters. And such nerve to care about the competitive scene more than the casuals cries over the lack of an arcade mode at launch.
This is the breakfast equivalent of trying to get more food by ignoring the chicken and rubbing two eggs together as if they will mate.
It’s really stupid.
Catering to the demographic that will, let’s be honest here, slurp up whatever Capcom offers and claim that it’s gold on the basis that A: they’re mega-fans or B: it’s their livelihood, is stupid when it is done at the expense of your largest demographic.
Especially when true support of the competitive scene comes via making a product that converts casuals into competitive players. SFV totally fails at that by virtue of not being appealing to casuals at all much less as a gateway drug into high-level play.
Capcom aren’t monsters. They’re just total idiots.
Says you. The process of converting a casual to a hardcore player isn’t just giving them lots of single player content. All that does is keep them casual. They have to show the casuals that they are missing out on something better. I will not argue against including a better tutorial to help them, but there is only so much they can do to make someone want to be hardcore. The best thing they can do is to make the hardcore scene look more fun. And since arcades aren’t a viable option in the west, the best way to do that is with lots of exciting competitions with good announcers and big pots.
This is all pretty simple and easy to understand stuff, but you will no doubt reply with yet another assertion that Capcom has done nothing to help the competitive scene, which is objectively false for reasons already stated.
I will acknowledge the shortcomings of the game, but failing to cater to the competitive scene is definitely NOT one of them.
Except casuals aren’t going to buy the game without single player content, so your whole theory falls apart immediately. You can’t convert a community that thinks your game is a ripoff into hardcore players of said game. You have to have them at all before you can teach them.
My contention is that Capcom has done more damage to the competitive scene than help. That doesn’t mean they haven’t done anything to help…that was not my contention…just that it’s a net loss because of their utter failure to make the game appeal to a large audience.
Converting casuals is heavily a numbers game. If one in a thousand players convert, it means you have to expose the game to A LOT of players to increase the hardcore player base. Since SFV has sold like boxed cancer, this means they’ve totally failed in that regard. What’s more, since a lot of those people that DID buy it ended up totally turned off by the product, it lowers that conversion percentage.
I know it makes Capcom Defense Force members shit their pants in anger, but Netherealm has done FAR more good for their hardcore scene than Capcom has just by virtue of shear numbers & positive exposure.
To me no one is really going to see what NRS has done for its hardcore community when more people are showing up for SFV tourneys than MKX. It’s hard to point that out to people and have them go “oh ok…MKX definitely has the better competitive community with the largest amount of players and skill base”. I don’t know how many players MKX had, but it definitely wasn’t 1,024 players which they said was 3 times the amount of people they had last year for SFIV.
Which means obviously, they did reach out to some new blood if over a thousand people showed up. Some of those players obviously being guys who are just converted from casual and probably got 0-2 bodied. Just there to have a good.
Ironically Shin Blanka is lucky SFV didn’t sell better than it did. Otherwise he would have had TOO MANY people which would have likely broke fire code at the venue or would have had to cancel many other tournaments to get the space needed for the extra players. Even with SFV being a sales disaster there are still a lot of casuals and veterans who said “hey this is what I wanna compete in at Atlanta”. Still many more than ever before.
Final numbers show that Street Fighter V had FIVE times more entrants than MKX despite Capcom’s sales drama (1,021). The players have decided this is the game they want to play at tournaments. MKX finalized at 206 players. Which isn’t bad, but doesn’t even top regular SFIV numbers from last year.
Which really won’t help anyone if the boxes continue to be unsold and people continue to quit playing the game online. That 1,021 number appears to represent a statistically significant number of the total player population for the entire game. Having a super dedicated audience is a great thing, but you can’t support a game on ~5,000 players globally and Capcom can’t stay solvent by selling revealing Cammy costumes to those people unless they cost like $300 per outfit.
It’s just interesting how Capcom has purposely or accidentally gotten farther with eSports even with a complete sales disaster than a game that has currently made way more money. It’s just weird to have a game that is making all of the casual money, but can’t hold more than 200 people at a venue for the biggest regional major in America. Whereas SFV is getting 5 times the amount of players and had Evo worthy Twitch viewer numbers for grand finals (80,000).
It’ll be interesting to see if Capcom just has some strange short term unprecedented success with is eSports, but then just to have SFV crumble six months later. Be interesting to see if the lack of disc and download copy sales and DLC will just make it a short term success and suddenly just have a curtain fall over it with Capcom shutting down the project. It’s possible I guess.
SF also has a MUCH higher core audience of hardcore players than MK. MK started with virtually nothing with MK9 when it comes to real hardcore players other than those that admirably pour time into UMK. They’ve grown from there. SF has had a big audience and that audience got bigger with SF4. Tournament runners & organizers have worked their asses off and the community has done a lot to help build that hardcore community and I think that is what we’re seeing with the number of entrants. For fucks sake, the last thing Capcom did at Final Round was piss off all of their hardcore players by having nothing to offer them regarding information for Alex & the accompanying patch. That is the sort of thing Capcom has been doing to “support” their player base. Stupid move after stupid move after stupid move while their hardcore community forges onward through their own efforts & momentum in spite of Capcom’s idiocy.
I’d just like to know what MKX can do to have more than 200 people show up at a tournament? Is it going to take SFV being shut down by Capcom for them to crack more than 1/5th of SFV’s entrants per major?
That’s effectively a big punch in the face to NRS when they are getting all of the casual money but have done nowhere near as good of a job converting those people to offline eSports events. Their eSports efforts are nearly going in vain if a company that’s basically spitting on its casual and hardcore base is pulling 5 times the entrants.
If you want to be honest it really doesn’t matter how good overall numbers at a tourney really is if ultimately the actual way for them to keep the game lasting long and staying alive for years never works out.
I’m honestly tired of using this as an example because this is mainly a Street Fighter thing but again, Dead or Alive 5 was mainly able to keep itself alive for 5-6 years despite never really going over 100+ players in it’s tournaments or being heavily advertised simply because people still buy it’s DLC, which TN uses after that to help finance the tourney scene and otherwise.
Street Fighter 4 survived on the similar principle of having plenty of people buy it’s game and updates and costumes and had a very good volume regardless.
Street Fighter 5 is honestly the game that really shows just marketing it to competitive players does not and will not work. As you said yourself later on, it’s hard to tell how long Street Fighter 5 will actually last competitively. Just because it has huge numbers at FR19 and EVO doesn’t suddenly make a game a success competitive-wise for years to come, just that year.
And if you look on Facebook…there is PLENTY of people making their rage at Capcom known.
Yeah, the sales are important. It’s just somehow if SFV DOES survive for 5 to 6 years, I don’t see any game competing with its eSports ever. It already couldn’t be beat eSports wise during IV and other games are still struggling to compete MORE THAN EVER with its eSports when the game commercially is in turmoil. If they are struggling more than ever vs SFV’s eSports during a PR/sales disaster…what’s going to happen if it bounces back?
If SFV finds a way to survive it will be the absolute king of Fighting Game eSports for certain. Like to the point where I’m not even sure if the other companies should even bother with their eSports ventures.
Well that is true…but there’s the problem of a different kind. If Street Fighter only represents the core FGC and the only game getting rep, then it’s going to stagnate…fast.
There has to be variety of any and all kinds. Yeah there’s only one Basketball league…but it’s not the only SPORTS League now is it?
They do, but at least they are within a different genre of eSports. MOBAs are the king of eSports, but it’s like Soccer. Soccer is the world’s sport, but not everyone likes watching Soccer and those other sports find their niche.
SFV isn’t really in direct competition with MOBA eSports in the same way NFL isn’t really trying to beat FIFA. It’s another section of eSports. Whereas other fighting games trying to go eSports are in direct competition with SFV to gain exposure. With the way things are going SFV will pretty much be the only real fighting game eSport that is necessary. It’s easily going to be the game that people associate with fighting game eSports the most.