So I bought SFV and Tekken 7 on PC and was taking a look at the current player base in both.
Tekken 7 being new sits around 18000 users per day
SFV sits about 2000
This seems unbelievably low. As a newbie to fighters, have I just thrown away my chances at getting in to SFV? Surely the PC playerbase is too low to learn and improve online 
SFV online is cross platform
this came up a lot lately with the big amount of fighting games we now have. you need to consider that with steam you can actually see how niche the genre really is while on PS4 or XBO there is no such thing as steamcharts.com and you can only speculate. SF5 is crossplay anyways so it doesn’t matter there. ask people about T7 though that have both the PC and PS4 version and they claim that they can find more matches on PC. if this is indeed true, the amount of players on PS4 is even lower. I guess this also depends on where you live. while in the USA probably more people play on console in Europe it’s quite different.
Yeah a lot of great fighting games have been coming to steam, the problem is the playerbase is often too small. SF5 is cross platform, Killer Instinct has cross play as well. These are fairly big name titles also. I feel the smaller titles that release on multiple platforms could greatly benefit from crossplay.
Playerbase is always gonna be on console. SF5 pc not as bad with crossplay but crossplay is an anomaly and don’t expect it for upcoming games like marvel and dbz either.
I play on PC and I never had trouble finding opponents.
As others have noted, the game is cross platform so you’re also getting matched vs PS4 players (which is sometimes better because people with potato PCs can lag).
how many people do you need for a fighting game?
usf4 had something around 1000-1300 active player (thats just the number of people being online at the same time)
and i can tell you that i had never, no matter at which day of the week or time, a issue to find people in ranked to play with!
maybe there are more people for certain games on certain platforms but at this point you dont even know that for sure
since they dont give out any numbers of active people…at the end of the day, the big titles will always have some kind of stable playerbase
no matter which platform you play on…as long as there are no techniqual issues.
PC fighting game community isn’t as bad anymore as people make it out to be.
It’s continuously growing and after the new game hype dies down, retains a dedicated playerbase.
You don’t do anything wrong if you go for Tekken 7 on pc. SFV is another thing entirely. Some people say it’s great, but I personally have problems with desyncs and lag on the Steam version of SFV, while having better online matches on Tekken 7 Steam than on T7 PS4.