imo, it comes from the fact that aparently many fans are anime fans (not surprise, they are japanese games) that like the games for the story and character desing
they like single player modes because they actually dont enjoy the same way, like the fighting game fans, playing against other people with a competitive drive, so those modes are an alternative for playing against other people online
also i dont need to remember you how missinformed is the average joe when it comes about of the playing to win mentallity and how many of them have twisted shit on their heads
this comes from what i have seen on the hongfire thread that i created for scv and other posts made by people for other games
not saying that this is true for everyone, but is one of the many possibilities from the continuum shift
The whole idea with singleplayer content is that fighting games are by their nature fairly hard to get into these days.
You want something that draws people into the game for repeated play while they grow a bit in the system and get used to the game.
MikeZ’s answer, per the article is ‘teach people better!’, but I’m not sure that will work, they have to be dedicated to and enjoy the game in the first place in order to even want to learn.
Unless they can learn by doing, which is the goal of singleplayer modes.
(So its not for anyone taking part in the discussion, pretty much automatically. We’re already committed to the genre)
About Capcom games and 1p content, SF4, MvC3, and SFxT sold primarily on name recognition. The games that sell really well and have immediately active scenes are invariably the ones that have that notsalgic appeal, or at least brand awareness.
Name recognition moves copies, but doesn't necessarily keep people playing or build the scene, and that's what we need.Best way to do that is to teach them about the stuff that makes it fun to play as Ken vs your buddies in the first place.
Everything else is just a bait and switch strategy that history has shown doesn’t work. Capcom doing nothing and getting more sales and higher reviews than others who do add that “Single Player” content they always want. It’s another example of consumers not actually wanting what they say they want.
i would like fighting games to feed me
50 cents give me like at least a hardboiled egg or a carrot or something.
if i buy a $60 game i should be fed for a month.
I don’t think history has shown it doesn’t work. It’s just that there are multiple factors feeding into it.
Of course if they really want too keep people playing, they need to have a whole bunch of ‘level ups’ and unlocks, but that’s Armageddon.
I think the best way is to make playing out of the box immediately rewarding while having a consistent, ongoing learning curve without any major spikes. That’s way easier said than done tho’ 
You can live on $2 a day? What are you, Gandhi?
some developers honestly put in the effort in trying to change that, CyberConnect2 really tried with what they had to work with in SCV story mode and to be honest, it was a good effort and could be the step in the right direction…some people may not like the final fantasy styled cutscenes but it’s not a bad way to go in telling a narrative…considering that most fighters have bland stories to begin with, characters being fleshed out in cinematic cutscenes is a start…
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People just wanted a good new hype SF game. SFIV basically found a way to give the sprite based gameplay of SF without having to resort to sprites and still being rather stylish which for the time was pretty unique. A lot of people thought SFIV would have too many issues converting into 3D (especially with the controversy of SF EX), but they got it to work out. I remember the arguments of Vega/Claw would not work in 3D because they wouldn’t be able to switch his claws as he switched sides.
From there Capcom needs to stop making people feel like fighting games are quantum physics and just show them that with the right knowledge and tools they can get the head start they need towards learning the game. They’re completely throwing the theory of fighting games to the side in the games themselves and there’s nothing better than something that makes people feel more confident in game about how they are playing and reacting to things. I’ve heard people talk about how they’ve started to react more efficiently to pressure situations and mix ups in SFIV after playing the tutorial in Skullgirls.
Of course they have no problem throwing in stuff that will confuse you more like trial modes that use resource impractical combos (heavy meter burn, heavily situational etc.). Now you can go fight good people yayyy.
Make learning to play a part of the game. Don’t water the game down in a flashy way just so they can find out later that the game has depth and things they have to OMG LEARN. Just show them that it’s not quantum physics and what they need to do to think like a fighting game player.
I don’t see games like TF2 or CS or those countless MOBAs failing due to lack of singleplayer content. I don’t see why fighting games can’t do the same.
They’re substantially more accessible than fighting games are, in essence.
FPS like TF2 and CS (or any of the console ones) are also different in that they’re pretty carefully designed so you always feel like you’re accomplishing something, even if you’re just terrible… Altho’ less Counterstrike than the others, its older. All the megapopular console FPS do that though.
MOBA’s have dead simple controls, and you can jump right in and do stuff.
Beyond that, Many modern FPS and MOBAs (notably LoL) have grinding/unlock systems that give players the feeling that they’re progressing and gaining something concrete by playing (which is also the main way MMOs hold people).
So really it comes down to immediate payoff and systems designed to reward play regardless win/lose progress.I’ve played CS on a serious level (back in the early 2000’s). That game actually has a bigger slippery slope mechanic than fighters as constantly losing rounds denies you access to better guns and equipment.
And lol at MOBAs letting you get in and do stuff. If you have no idea what you’re doing (especially in DOTA and DOTA2), you’re going to get screwed really quick and the verbal abuse you’ll be getting from your team is going to make things worse.
MOBA’s are way harder to get into than fighting games. The community in those games are terrible, it’s really just people yelling at you and calling you a noob. I really like the games, but playing it without 4 of your friends just isn’t fun to me, because like, there’s something about that genre that attracts the worst kind of person.
Again, CS is a bit different, when you look at it, its age shows.
You’re very right about MOBA’s, but that’s the culture not the game.
Although I’d have to admit the game design encourages that culture a lot (it seriously seriously punishes the whole team for one players failure, especially with experience).
But, anybody can go in, use abilities and kill creeps. The baseline play is like… 30 seconds to learn, if that. FPS are the same way, ‘these keys make you move, this button makes you fire, move your mouse around to aim and turn’.
I’d argue that fighting games, especially to the outside seem much more forbidding than other genres, and that the combo videos and youtubes kind of make this worse. So like if you watch a vid or stream of somebody playing Modern warfare, you can pretty much do the basics of what the guy on screen is doing. There are tons of things you’re not seeing of course, and skill you don’t get, but it feels the same. Watch somebody playing MvC2 or 3, and then go and put the disk in and try to reproduce what they’re doing (this is ‘you’ as the hypothetical noob, not you specifically, of course :p), and you absolutely can’t, there’s just no way.
And that’s the difference I think, Other genres usually make you think “I can totally do that!”, fighting games really don’t… unless you’re already committed to playing and learning them.
edit:
Yeah, I said it above but… I think it’s specifically that your whole team is punished pretty badly if you get killed, so it has a much bigger impact on play… which leads to a hostile culture.
(MOBA’s seriously have the worst culture of any competitive game genre I can think of, shit’s so toxic)
I’m going to have to agree with what said Mike_Z
Fighting games have built up a mysticism over the years of being the hardest things ever. You have fighting game players saying VF is the hardest, most complex fighter ever, imagine how that sounds to someone who thinks MvC3/SFxT is complex. He probably thinks VF is rocket science and quantum physics.
It’s up to developers/community to stop scaring people off. We’re like the big brother constantly telling the little brother there’s a monster under his bed when we say how hard fighting games are. We are not jedis or some special breed of humans that have special powers to figure out how to play a fighting games, fighting games aren’t hard to learn.
These games are great and we want to share them and get other people playing. Half of what VF4EVO did should be standard in fighting games by now.
MOBAs and MMOs attract addicts. Addicts are bad people and need help. The developers of those games are even worse people because they are intentionally designing these games with highly addictive qualities. They are digital crack dealers.
you can thank BF for making SFIV a reality 
Because apparently, the average consumer has no friends to play fighting games with… Or so I’ve been told by Gamespot, who assumes I don’t want to play SSX and Need for Speed on a couch w/ my friends so they give those games high review scores regardless of the blasphemous missing attribute of local multiplayer… That shit pisses me off…
The total lack of local multiplayer killed my hype for SSX.
That shit just isn’t fair
Even if we debunk this idea that fighting gamers are a special elite, which is certainly not true, the genre is extremely competitive in nature.
There are examples of fighting games that appeal to the wider demographic, anime tie-in games and smash brothers, which plenty of people play without any desire to be better.
But the games that this site is based around is a lot more competitive that the latest edition of dragon ball z, and the community needs to realize that a wide demographic just doesn’t want to take their game to the next level.
The “SRK” games can be enjoyed in the same way as Smash, DBZ, Naruto, etc. fighters but the mysticism about how much harder these games are stops them from trying to at all.
My brother and his friends, who are more of the CoD types, were playing KoF and screwing around, having fun and talking shit. They were still talking shit about beating each other in KoF when the game was off.
Fighting games in the beginning didn’t start off thinking it was going to build an entire competitive scene from it, they just added some stuff and let you do things and players refined it and created tactics and strategies. Now we know what you can do in fighters but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun playing it outside of the competitive way. You can still play these games the same way as when we touched a fighter for the first time.
It’s plain old elitism. There are some extremely helpful people in the community who do their best to help people along in this genre(Max for example), but there are some folks who pride themselves on playing the most difficult genre ever. They scoff at games like Melee because it doesn’t have supers or because of it’s nontraditional combo system and they shit on anything that tries to cater to the more casual audience like BB with it’s moderate speed and input buffers. Some folks who play fighters pride themselves on playing games that aren’t for “kids”, “pedophiles”, “creepers” and “scrubs”. I love the community overall, but you’d be blind if you didn’t notice the trending attitudes among lots of posters and tourney goers who act like playing Brawl makes you a leper(they should be playing Melee dammit).
It goes deeper than people wanting to make themselves look skilled and this attitude makes even hardcore gamers skittish with one another(Third Strike OE is dead in the water and BB is pretty much all Japan these days since it’s not Guilty Gear). The MK community and Skullgirls community seem to be coexisting with the FGC despite the constant trolling and shitty attitudes from the hateful subsection of stream monsters. It’d be amazing if something similar could happen for the next Smash, that Sony game, Guilty Gear and new IP in the future. Folks need to be more accepting on a fundamental level that includes mechanics and aesthetics.
Developers like Capcom really need to step it up though. I haven’t seen anything from Capcom that rivals Skullgirls’ tutorial or even BB’s tutorial(let’s not even get into VF4). They are big enough to make something decent that can be patched and expanded on further. MvC3 was absolutely horrible from a learning perspective thanks to it’s lack of tutorials, weak mission mode(with no replays) and borked online that paired people up against opponents with 500+ matches on day one. It’s getting kind of sad after all the years of sandbox halo and overall teaching improvements in other genres. Fighters don’t need to be so hard to get into… and they aren’t nearly as exclusive as people like to think. They certainly have just as much to offer as games from other genres.
Don’t worry I’m sure there are teams at the big developers working on how to design addictive behavior into our Fighting games too 