Yeah but if the bottom drops out of Capcom or SF all-together, how long will that scene hold together? Is Capcom going to keep fronting money for tournaments for a dead game? What about peripheral manufacturers? Why are they going to front money for peripherals for a game that no one buys?
EVERYTHING done for the competitive scene is just in the hopes of drawing the interest of casuals…not to appease the hardcore. The hardcore are often such poorly discriminating customers that they’ll gobble-up whatever. Their money is guaranteed…and, on top of that, that money is an absolute joke of a pittance in the grand scheme of things.
The bottom line is money and the hardcore players deluding themselves into thinking the release of SFV in its current state was to make them happy are out of their minds. Capcom was hoping to get a months worst of BIG money flooding in with the release of SFV right before the end of the fiscal year. It was a calculated business move motivated entirely by the belief that they could get away with it. They thought could release a hollow, unfinished product…get people to gobble it up…and make their investors happy all in one fell swoop. They gambled…and lost.
MKX would probably need to release two more games of the same calibur and without the same launch issues. Smash can pull similar numbers and no one owns a WiiU. Lifelong fandom can do a lot.
The competitive success of SFV is honestly kind of bizarre. That level of hardcore interest on sales that low is unheard of. It’s like the entire FGC is holding hands to support the game. It’s not even that it was lacking casual features, it’s missing bog standard competitive ones like lobbies or useful friends lists.
FR19 and Evo may well both be a fluke as the ENTIRE hardcore base for SF comes out of hibernation for a new core game. The real test is what tourney and stream numbers are like in 6 months after the attrition sets in and people fall off. This is kind of uncharted territory.
Don’t quote me on this, but I don’t think there’s a straight answer anyone can give. It depends on how much they win from tournaments and if their sponsor gives them any money, considering they even have a sponsor. And I mean this for all fighting games, not just Street Fighter. I know there’s a website that shows you how much a player has won from their career in fighting games, but I don’t remember what it’s called. Some of the numbers seem fairly high, like over $100,000, but you have to take into consideration that it’s across their entire fighting game career, many of which span over a decade. SonicFox and Momochi are probably the only ones who’ve made a lot of money in a relatively short amount of time. Even Infiltration and ChrisG during their super dominant years really didn’t make that much in the grand scheme of things. I’d have to find this website again and look it up to confirm.
There’s a reason most pro players have a normal job and/or still go to school outside of competing.
Except everything I just said was about the game getting exposure with the competitive circuit. FR19 was on the front page of Twitch and got something like 80k viewers toward the end. Do you think that was all hardcore players watching? People can see the tournaments and be influenced by that alone. If anything the game just needs to lose the high price tag because it might discourage people from trying it out. Adding single player content to make it a justifiable price is the wrong way to go about doing it.
I’d like to see proof of that. Giving casuals a bunch of single player stuff to encourage them to buy the game all goes out the window when they get repeatedly bodied online or at a meet up. Then they need a reason to keep playing other people because it’s no longer fun for them.
This is true. Capcom should have worked on cutting their overhead and not releasing a super hyped up AAA game if their goal was to make it a DLC-driven esport so they could sell it for much less than $60. And as much as I like the idea of being able to earn characters with fight money, it’s probably better for the future of the game to make people buy them with cash.
Sample size is too small for a measurement. Daigo makes bank (off endorsements) but most pro players likely don’t pull down much at all. Many have actual jobs. I’d say SonicFox and Diago are probably making the most with everyone else at a fraction of where they are. SonicFox is mostly just there because his year of godhood in MK was super lucrative.
If literally every single person at the peak of final round bought five new copies they’d still be at half of their stated sales goal.
I agree completely. I think their monetization scheme was built for a F2P game and an executive got scared somewhere down the line and decided it had to be a full price game. Why they didn’t then give it the multi year development cycle of a full price game I have no idea, the game was in the oven half as long as it should have been. I think Capcom might have just run out of money. Either way it’s not good.
It’s no surprise that SF would be the most popular core fighting game at tournaments. It has a legacy and a history of being the main event game. MK has a history of being absolute dogshit gameplay-wise up until MK9. I remember how big of a deal it was for MK to finally be at Evo and for their to be a fatality done on the main stage for the first time. It was kind of a “it finally made it” moment.
I could throw any kind of gaming event though and invite a bunch of people. If I gave them a choice of one fighting game to have at said event I guarantee that almost all of them would say MK. Any acquaintance of mine that finds out I play fighters always chooses MK as their game of choice when they want to talk shit and challenge me. At my locals MKX was always the one game not called smash bros that had the highest attendance.
So NRS is definitely doing something right when they have such a large fanbase still playing their game and paying for DLC.
Admittedly they are not doing much to bring said fanbase into our world. We’re still such a niche hobby. Quite honestly I’ve seen a bunch of people try to get into high level MK and then immediately get turned off by what they think is “really cheap shit”.
Of course that’s something that can’t really be helped. I remember training a dude how to play Raiden in MK9 and he would refuse to do any of the combos or set ups I taught him because they were “too good”.
Basically I’m saying that the interest is there,but as S-kill once said. “You can lead a scrub to water, but you can’t make’em drink”.
Very true. Especially since MKX is pretty frickin’ grimy. Not that MK9 and Injustice were exactly “honest” or anything. Smash and MK definitely have the casual fanbase on-lock, but then Smash and Street Fighter own the competitive scene. Side note, hope to see Tekken 7 possibly get a good sales and competitive growth what with the hype around Akuma being in the game. I’ve never really been a Tekken guy, but I till want to see it do well. Anyways, I don’t really get how more people haven’t wanted to get into competitive MK. Around here, the NRS scene is completely dead, which makes it harder for me to want to improve. Online is great now, but offline is still better overall for leveling up, at least for me.
But I guess it has to do with what some other people are saying with the whole competitive legacy thing. People have always loved competitive Street Fighter. And Melee is a thing. And like you say, MK was flat-out bad for a LONG time. I don’t get why they stuck with 3D for so long. None of the games from MK4 to MK vs DC could even come close to anything from Tekken or Soul Calibur or anything.
But with NRS helping promote the competitive scene so much, it still baffles me. There’s MKX ESL, NRS contributes to pot bonuses sometimes, Ed Boon actually pays attentions to and interacts with the community a lot, players have even been involved with the game (beta testers, 16Bit helping with the official streams/videos, etc.), and plenty of other stuff. They don’t quite have an NRS Pro Tour (MKX ESL isn’t exactly the same thing), but that’s still a lot. I first got into fighting games because of the official Injustice page on Facebook promoting Evo. Maybe it’s the way NRS has done it vs. how Capcom has done it? I feel like a lot of it has to do with a lot of the blind hatred and hostility much of the FGC seems to have towards NRS games and the community, but there’s plenty of hate everywhere, so that can’t be all of it. I love the FGC, but it’s definitely not perfect. I don’t know. Maybe the casual NRS community tends to be more scrubby than the casual SF community or something? And I’m not just talking about the little kids who shouldn’t be playing the game “who are gonna learn today.”
Capcom has been more or less doing the same thing since USF4 or even SFxT, but with much bigger competitive turnouts. Even with the awful sales and horrible reviews from many users with SFV. But, again like many have been saying, we’ll see how that affects the scene in the long run. Especially if T7 does really well and with so much money being thrown at Pokken, maybe even that will take some people. I don’t know. We’ll see. As an example, I’m currently entered for SFV at Evo, but since I haven’t liked the game so far, that’s already putting a damper on entering it for next year. I know I’m only one irrelevant person, but I doubt I’m the only one who feels something like this. I’m currently more excited for entering a USF4 side tournament or getting completely destroyed in the 3S side tournament than the SFV one, even though I probably have the best chance at SFV (joined too late into SF4 to consider myself even competent at it, and 3S? HAH!).
i say give it time. once they add more characters that people love and introduce new mechanics as the game gets older, it should definitely cater to more people. i admit i was skeptical at first because i thought usf4 was an excellent spectator title in tournaments and lots of stream monsters call sfv “sleep fighter 5”, but after final round, i think the games are still exciting to watch at high level play
I guess NRS will just have to be content with their buckets of money and yearly releases, no doubt crying into their gold studded personalised handkerchiefs that they have such a smaller offline scene.
Sarcasm aside, given NRS have such successful, almost yearly releases, of FG’s they only have to get it right once regarding the offline scene. And they will have ample opportunity. Capcom on the other hand have burnt so many people so many times that I’m surprised they even got the go ahead for a SFV with such poor releases of other FG’s so recent in their history.
I’m actually going to buy MK XL tomorrow, MK9 had so much content and was such a good purchase.
Maybe if MKX wasn’t been discontinued on PC, and if both MK9 and MKX hadn’t such awful PC ports a lot of this “blind hatred and hostility” could be avoided?
You no likey MK9? Longevity wasn’t great, but the content in the game was more than worth a purchase. The online modes were a blast as well.
You scoff at MK9 being a ‘bad’ purchase, yet I bet you think SF5 that shipped with NOTHING but an online 2 player lobby system was a good buy. Typical.
I had way more fun playing MK9 than sf4. There. I said it. Constant balance changes killed that shit though. Especially when all the changes were retarded such as giving everyone armor on EX moves when certain characters really didn’t need it.