This is a more general question, but I thought I’d stick it in the SG forum since SG is probably a good example case.
Let’s say that SG does everything exactly right. Balance is good, gameplay is fun and deep, patches are handled appropriately and well, netcode works great. Everything that anyone ever complained about in FGs is solved. (well, apart from art-style and all-female cast).
Is this enough to make SG a dominant game in the FG scene? To make it the Starcraft, the DoTA, the Counterstrike of 2D FGs, knocking SF4 from the top spot? (I’m leaving Tekken out, since 3D FGs are quite different).
Personally, I dont think it would. I get the feeling fanboyism is far too entrenched, that even if a new FG like SG is perfect, a majority of players will stick to SF4 or MvC3, even while they complain about it. Not having Japan doesnt help either.
Of course, that’s not to say SG cant make a profit or be a success. I’m just musing on how it doesnt matter how good your game or your ideas are, player communities are large ships that turn very slowly. If at all.
Easiest or rather: Most likely way to “make it big” is not having old people shift, but attracting new players.
WoW didn’t become the biggest MMORPG there is by making EverQuest fans come over, but by attracting a duckload of people that never touched an MMORPG before.
Giving this game a great tutorial and thus the easiest learning curve of all the fighters, attracting people that are generally into FGs but felt out of place could go a long way - particularly if this eg gets promoted on Steam (simply because of the lack of fighters on the PC).
Theoretically, the potential is there. However, Indie producers always got problems with their promotions. Most people on these forums haven’t ever heard of Skullgirls - let alone most people playing FGs in general, let alone most people who are faintly interested in FG but have no connection to any scene due to not actually playing.
E: Most people aren’t actually “fanboys” but simply afraid to try out new things. They spend 3 years to learn SF4, they don’t want to scratch half of that to start playing KOF and be a scrub again. They’re afraid of buying MvC3 and being totally lost. A Tutorial that get’s blessed by magazines and players alike as allowing an easy headstart would go a long, long way.
Jokes aside, marketing is all it needs. Don’t waste time on trying to convince people with silly reasons to not play the game like “This game would be cool if there were men, I can’t be seen playing this”.
Not to be pessimistic, but I’m seeing the game’s title and majority female cast being a bit of a discouragement for new players deciding whether or not to play SG. If we’re talking about brand new players, without a company/franchise bias, who are looking to get into a fresh modern fighting game, the only thing have to go by is looks and appearances. I can see girls taking a liking to this game, but most guys will look at it and go “Meh, not my type of game; too girly.” It’s easy to say “Well those people are just ignorant scrubs who don’t know what a good FG is” but still that’s one less person willing to get into the game. Not to say that everybody who plays a FG is gonna go out, support the scene, and play in tournaments, but the chances are greater if the scene is bigger.
Ask a casual Tekken player why they think Tekken is better than Virtua Fighter, and most of them will say “Better characters. Better stages, Better music, Better story. etc” Ask a casual MK player why they think MK is better than SF, and most will say “Blood, gore, fatalities, gritty, not weeaboo, etc.”
Maybe I’m being pessimistic here, but I get the feeling fighting games are already pretty saturated market. ie. anyone who is potentially interested in playing FGs is probably already doing so. ie. the amount of new players you can attract are a minority compared to existing player population.
WoW is a different story because MMOs were an emerging genre. Via Blizzard’s brand power, WoW took MMOs into the mainstream at a time when few people knew much about MMOs.
Lets put a different spin on the topic. Rather than SG, lets say it was KOF13 that did everything perfect. So now the issues of artstyle and cast gender become less of an issue (KOF is still kind of anime, I guess, but its not as overtly anime as BB, AH, MB). We also have an established brand.
Could such a KOF take over top spot? I still say no.
I have to agree with ya most people would be very wary because of the bullshit Capcom been pulling in the past few years they basically flooded the market. Going with what Vulpes said most players are just scared of being scrubs again. So they’ll just stick to what they know. So SG has a huge uphill battle. They have to battle through the fearful, fanboys and the just plain ignorant of the FG scene in general if they’re gonna be a huge hit. Yet I think they’re gonna do a good job because GGPO is the online netcode, It’s gonna be cheap at $30 and the tutorial mode is really gonna help newer players. That’s just the start of why SG is gonna do well.
Skull girls is going to be a success. Mike Zaimont who is an ACTUAL FG player is on board so he knows what to do as far as the fighting system. And the whole Skull girls team is putting alot of love into the game. Plus everybody who talks about it only has good things to say. So ya it;ll be big and hopefully other companies will pay attention to what it does and learn a thing or two from it cough capcom cough
You know, I find just the slightest bit of irony in there. Im finding that im one of the very few girls here. I usually don’t even usually go for the “all girl cast” thing myself, but I somehow enjoy it. Im a bit of a tomboy.
SG? Nah. It won’t usurp the SFIV/Marvel3 but it’ll give competition to BB and wlll make it into evo.
Anytime you have an all (or mostly) female cast there are jokers that will start throwing around stupid slurs about weaboo or whatever that deters a lot of people.
A lot of people don’t like air dashes (to complicated for them when they are starting out).
SG has pretty solid marketing but unlike established franchises you don’t have tv marketing money or front page of major gaming website money which is the #1 way to attract new blood. If you don’t attract the crowds you don’t attract the better players typically. A lot of old school players play mvc3 and SFIV because “it’s where the crowds are”. You gotta get the scrubs to get the FG scene.
True that. A solid fighting game being overlooked by games that are constantly getting patched and/or have tons of posts/threads/forum with people crying for buffs/nerfs. I fear that Skullgirls may suffer the same fate…the fate of being overlooked, not that other stuff.
Has there been any all-girl fighters that made it big in the US?
Well that’s cool. My bad if I was generalizing too much.
I think if the game was called ‘Skullworld’, people would be more open to it, even if it the majority cast was female.
I see it being the new Guilty Gear. Will bring in a lot of solid blood, some new blood and some old school players out of the woodwork “finally…new game that isn’t durpy? I’ll come back!”. There’s definitely going to be a solid tournament following for this game but it’s not going to be the most popular among casuals/stream monsters in comparison to SFIV and will have to work to even be more popular than UMVC3.
That doesn’t really matter too much though because as long as the game gets solid higher level player support…just like Guilty Gear it’ll bring big numbers at tournaments and more people will learn to support it the more they realize how good it is.
In the end though…just like any fighting game it’s the casuals/stream monsters that make up most of the sales for a game and the game just won’t sell or be as widely understood as SFIV or MVC3. That doesn’t really matter too much though for us since we just want a solid new game to play at tournaments that teaches casuals/scrubs to think like tournaments players instead of just watering the game down for them. A game that will bring solid numbers for tourneys even though it isn’t the most casual popular game (like 2006 to 2008 GG).
I think SG will succeed for a multitude of reasons.
-It’s actually being marketed–and not with a single crappy TV ad like MvC3 did, or a crappy webshow that SFxT had–rather it’s being pushed out into the open in every outlet (and for what it really is to boot). Despite what people think about it, everyone knows about it.
-It’s something new. It’s not a sequel, nor a re-imagining. Hell it’s the company’s first game. There is certainly something to be said for something fresh in a genre littered with existing IP’s.
-2D. People miss it dearly.
-It’s the first indie fighter. Sure we’ve had some small titles get pushed out but it’s nothing to this scale. People eat indie up like it’s leftover pizza.
-It has the support of the community. Whether you talk about our small fanbase or the community at large, I think people will give SG a chance because it has the competitive community in mind thoughout it’s entire design. From the gameplay to the UI, everything is for us. Despite the stream monsters and the “sexism” debate, I truly believe that the community at large feels this way.
-It’s a good game.
The only way it’ll make it big is if the game is being made by one of the bigger fighting game companies or a company with a massive marketing budget. Having all the features and gameplay isn’t enough anymore. We are also dealing with an audience/country that can play a game like Dead Space 2 where you shoot mutated toddlers without hesitation and flip their shit the moment an imaginary girl shows some panties because she just did a high kick.
Let us see if the US and fighting game fans can make me drown in a delicious plate of crow(I hope so)…
The thing is there is no doubt in my mind that this game will do relatively well because anybody who has actually “Played” the game loves it already. Thinking that it will overtake games like Marvel or Street Fighter is asking way too much. When great games like this come out you begin to realize that people don’t actually know what they want in a fighter. I hear people complain all the time about say Marvel and all the bullshit it has. Then I tell them you should check out Skullgirls, then they tell it doesn’t look like there kind of game when it has literally remedied everything they’ve complained about.
They’re more worried about what they might look like when they play a game with panty shots and an all female cast than actual game play. If people cared about really good game play and the like then KoF 13 should have blown up.(Not to say that it hasn’t, but you know what I mean.) At this point Capcom runs the market and for the most part if Capcom doesn’t have its name in the game then it will never be the lead game at a major. I honestly compare Capcom games to something like the Call of Duty series, while there are better shooters out there, COD is the most mainstream and easily accessible so it becomes the most popular.
Also it may look like I hate Capcom from this post but I don’t. I just think they’re the best example to use in this situation. The best we can do is try to open everyone’s eyes to this fantastic game.
I’m sure the game will sell well enough at first to more then justify its existence. And I’m sure, as word of mouth spreads on how the game is legitimate and fun, it’s popularity will increase, perhaps even to the point that bigger companies will take note and say “how can we make a game with as much lasting appeal as this?”. But most importantly, history is written by the winners. And Skullgirls will be remembered as a winner. Marvel 3 will be a mere footnote in the history of fighting games.
Yeah anybody who has PROBLEMS with MVC3 and doesn’t wanna play Skullgirls…they’re just like cutting their wrists. I personally think UMVC3 is a much more solid game than Vanilla and the better player wins more often despite the inevitable momentum swings the game presents. It’s just you can’t not want to play Skullgirls if you’re complaining about UMVC3. The guy who’s making the game is one of the biggest fans of the Marvel series and has done a ton of combo vid and gameplay material for MVC2 and other games. Like there’s almost no reason not to play a fighting game made by someone who wants a fighting game that accounts for the smallest things that competitive players complain about.
Speaking of that though I talked to one of my friends about the game and he came up with “well i dunno the game doesn’t look fast enough”. LOL. It’s definitely easily as fast as Melty Blood or the original Guilty Gear games which is good enough for me.
