After watching the Evo finals, I realized something. There was almost 24000 people watching the online stream, and I believe a further 4000 actually there in person, Street fighter is more than a game, I wouldn’t go as far to say it’s a sport, but it has its similarities.
I think Gootecks said something like this on the I Got Next documentary. A sport is a game by definition, but it’s more than just a game. A single team or player can have millions of fans and followers from around the world, people pour their emotions into it etc etc
So that brings me to Street Fighter; although it might not be the most popular video game in the world, you wouldn’t see 24000 call of duty players tune in to an online stream of the world finals. Why? because Call of Duty is just a game. Street Fighter is more than that, I see it as a tool to compete, in the same way a sport, like football or tennis is a tool to compete, just on a smaller level. I think it is because in Street Fighter, or any other fighting game, it is competitiveness at its highest level. It all comes down to you vs your opponent, your skills vs their skills, your mind games vs their mind games and the players understand this, so the players become the fans, unlike sports where the majority of the fans have never played professionally, or even semi-professionally.
That’s all I have to say, I wish i could talk more, but long essays aren’t my strong point lol
There are plenty of other highly competitive video games that would put SF to shame. I’m glad to see the popularity for fighting game tournaments growing, but FPS’s and RTS’s will always dominate the professional gaming tournaments. It’s as close to a sport as any video game is.
i agree with this to an extent. i wouldn’t say FPS aren’t ‘real competitive videogames’ because that just isn’t true.
but i do agree that some fighters have virtually no outside forces or variables that can help determine the outcome of a game. the street fighter series has always been this way.
but after watching the SC4 finals at Evo, i can’t say that game does not have any outside variables. especially when the one guy picked someone who he was going to use to easily knock the person out of the ring, then they randomly ended up on one of the 2 stages that have walls on all sides.
same goes for other levels in SC4, some are easier to knock people out of, some aren’t, and some charactesr are better at that then others.
sf4 though, when i lose a match (offline) it is a guarantee that the reason i lost is because i got outplayed or my execution was off. it wasn’t because of the random weapons spawning at bad times, or because of a bad random level being picked.
I’m not going to argue about skill level, but fighting games are much more exciting to watch than FPS. It’s hard to get the feeling of intensity from watching an FPS game. You feel it very easily when you’re playing, but it’s just not there when you’re watching.
Now everybody watching those EVO stream felt the hype. I even got into watching the Soul Caliber finals. I never played SC in my life. I hate 3d fighters, but I felt the hype. I was into it.
FPS are a games of skill and I respect the talent of all the pro players, but it doesn’t translate into a spectator sport unless you’re really familar with the game. Fighting games? That’s always fun to watch and easy to follow.
Now whether it’s good for the community or not is a debate I’m not getting into. I don’t even have the right to be involved in that debate.
For the most part though, I agree. I can’t think of any other RTS that would be good enough for competition due to various balance issues. Don’t throw War3 at me either, because even though that has a large competitive userbase, it’s by no means balanced (lol@UD’s vs Orc auto-lose)
The majority of FPS games as well, I agree are silly competitive wise. Quake and Unreal are pretty much the only one’s I’d consider being competitive. TF2 as well, but crits have to be turned off (which I believe is the standard).
you couldn’t be more wrong
especially about rts
because you don’t understand those games at the highest levels you are just going to assume that kills and wins are based on a certain amount of luck, random gun spawns, random grenades, random headshots, etc.
i bet when you first started playing street fighter you had no idea the complexity of mind games (because no one does until they play the game for a while and understand it) and all you saw was random this random that…
true, you can win in shooters by spraying, getting random shots, random grenades, etc. essentially getting lucky
but the same thing can be said about street fighter…
so you might get a few kills getting lucky in an fps or a few uppercuts by getting lucky in street fighter but that isn’t going to win you the game
same goes for anything else highly competitive
> ex cal-i day of defeat, dod:source player
(played cs, css, and call of duty competitively as well)
I have always though fighting games were still games but more close to playing a fast paced chess game. It is very mind tiring at time when you’ve played too long and are burnt out on figuring out good opponents. I don’t think it will ever grow to anything more than another video game to the general public. At most it could equal to any of the off the wall sports that they’d put on ESPN2… like Curling …Canada…
I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I think a very select few RTS games are just as competitive due to them being almost 100% balanced. StarCraft is a wonderful example. Unbelievable balance between all three races which limits variability down to a minimum, requiring nothing but skill out of the players to win.
The same factors come to play in FPS’s. The variables would be positioning and twitch skills. Nothing different than a fighting game. Often times, certain gadgets or weapons in FPS’s end up being “top tier,” but that’s not a variable because that’s what all the players end up using. Exceptions, such as Team Fortress 2 exist, but that game in itself is incredibly balanced so it works out for well competitive play.
I will say that fighting games are by far the most entertaining from a spectator point of view.
I always thought the same thing…until recently I saw a full blown Starcraft match between two of the best players in the world. It had commentary, player video overlay…all the fixins.
I really don’t like RTS games, but I was absolutely ENTHRALLED at how these guys are thinking like 9 steps ahead and always making subtle moves which can shift power tremendously in either direction.
Like…just the drama with both these players sending out scouts to certain areas, or trying desperately to prevent a certain resource from falling to their opponent…it was fascinating!!!
But without the commentary, I would not have been able to appreciate what I was watching.
It got me thinking that damn near any player versus player game COULD be really entertaining to a general audience if the commentary is well done.
You bring up a good point. I watched all of the recent gameplay videos of SC2 where two members of the development team were commentating on what was happening between the two players. Very, very entertaining. I, myself, am a huge RTS fan. Hell, my background is of StarCraft 2 on my home PC. I was a relatively good WC3 player when it came out, and played (and beat) some of the top 20 battle.net players at the time. I’d get worked a lot of times, too, but I’m generally pretty decent at those games, and find the ones released by Blizzard to be HIGHLY competitive with little to no balance issues to worry about.
In my opinion, no other type of game will ever stress you out as much as a good 1v1 match in a RTS against a skilled opponent. They make you shake out of nervousness EVERY fucking time, it’s an absolute riot, haha. I’m so stoked for SC2.
I’ve always felt that Fighting Games (like Street Fighter IV) to be a sport. Just a cyber sport :xeye:
You know… Like cyber athletes and the cybernetic circuit.
As others have said, you don’t seem to be aware of the larger competitive scene. there are games that have tourneys at the same level and above that of evo, many being handled in a more professional manner (not hating on evo, its not a ‘better’ style) such as starcraft in korea.
I am personally new to following street fighter, and it definatly has the potential to be shown along side the best (imo) competitive games such as starcraft, quake and 1.6.
I’ve said this before, and been flamed for it, and I expect I’ll say it again in the future. But one of the only things that could make fighting games fun to watch as an outsider (i.e - someone who has no idea what’s going on) is “publicized” rivalries and hyped up media coverage.
The Daigo vs. Wong finals were a really good example of that. Especially once it was Apolrog vs Roo. All the hype, the crowd going wild with every hit. That shit was exciting, and even if you had no idea what was going on and saw that it would still be exciting. Hell I’ve shown people the Daigo full parry video and, though they don’t know what’s going on, it’s exciting because the crowd is roaring and the commentators are freaking out. Its just dramatic and fun.
Mix in some player interviews, professional commentators with that level of knowledge (the commentators for SFIV evo, imo, did a really, really good job though, so I can’t complain about that. Just no mouthbreathing nerds commentating please, even if they do know every in and out of the game), some players with larger than life personalities to hype everyone up, plus a good hype machine and you’ve got a winning formula.
If you could get that level of hype across TV, that’s about the only way I could imagine outsiders watching it. And it would only be the highly publicized matches for a long time. Think of it this way, lots of people watch boxing title matches (and UFC title fights), compared to the amount of people that watch every individual fight.
…Canada…