SRK posted an article that pointed out the ginormous crowd difference in Dota 2 and LoL and the relatively little FGC. I don’t think more fighting games on PC is necessarily the answer, since some of the biggest fighting names are already there and the needle didn’t really move much.
but still what the hell, how are those games absolutely exploding in audience and revenue and all we get is 2k participants and 100k viewers for EVO?..
It’s extremely easy to create a market in order to expand and develop the scene.
With any PC game, you have various hardware, software, products, to go about advertising, allowing multiple players to become sponsored and support their needs to continue playing, thus giving life to said game.
Fighting games have… joysticks… and sometimes head phones…
In the end, it all comes down to business, not the community.
A few years ago FPSs were popular. Now DOTA clones are popular and FPSs are dying or dead. For example no one plays Unreal Tournament or similar types of hardcore titles, and COD is just casuals and kindergarten kids.
Wait a few years and DOTA clones will die while a different genre will take its place and fighting games will stay the same with their dedicated scene.
IMO MOBAs are in a weird place in terms of popularity. There are several very popular games, and there is a ton of upcoming games. This genre is a time sink, so it is doubtful one player is willing to juggle multiple MOBAs. I am currently working towards moving away from LOL and going into DOTA 2. I am interested in others, but one game is more than enough to focus on especially if you are trying to get decent with it.
I honestly can’t see what’s so appealing or what makes MOBA games like DOTA or LoL so popular. I get bored looking at them and the streams for them like the ESPN championship…uuugh, I just don’t see it. Sure, people have their fancies but seriously…their seriously boring as hell to play & watch. The only exception I make to this is Smite or LOCO (Land of Chaos Online) because it’s like I’m playing a 3rd-Person shooter MOBA game.
They’re easy to get into, easy to play, you’re on a team so if you lose it wasn’t because you suck “my team as just shit,” LoL is fucking free, it’s on the same casual level as WoW was where all your friends play it so you play to play with your friends which gets tons of people into it, it’s really easy to see why MOBA got big.
More people play mobas than fighting games. I don’t actually see a problem with this whatsoever. More people play (and watch) football than skiing, this wouldn’t affect my decision to either play football or ski. If some dev/publisher figures out a way to increase the player population without inhibiting competition, then good on them, but I’m not going to start or stop playing some game because of that.
Look, you can have one of two things:
You can have a game with a local and regional community that you interact with and compete against a lot, make some friends, with everybody in it for the long haul, or
You can have a community headed by future marketing executives currently college, based around media exposure and large payouts that you will probably never get a share of, that will probably evaporate like Starcraft 2 once everybody finds some other game they want to play.
These are priorities that you might be able to balance, but you’re going to have to emphasize one, at least when things are getting started. I care about games, so I’m really just interested in the games and the quality of play in tournaments.