Not sure if this made the rounds yet.
https://www.snk-corp.co.jp/us/press/2019/070901/
"SAMURAI SHODOWN TAKES THE MAIN STAGE AT EVO 2019!
$30,000 POT BONUS AND PRIMIERE SWAG TO THE WINNERS!
SNK is proud to announce that together with Athlon Games, we will be providing a pot bonus of $30,000 to the Evolution Championship Series 2019 (EVO 2019) SAMURAI SHODOWN tournament."
Even though I wasnt the biggest fan of sfiv, I will say the skill ceiling was really high for that game which is awesome for competitive play. Watching someone like bonchan or momochi out footsie some of the crazy “neutral skip” characters was awesome to watch. Also seeing character specialist do work was really cool.
You dont ever really feel any “wow” moments from sfv even at the highest level. Punk’s confirms and fuudo footsies with mika were about the only thing I got hype about. Cant really even watch sfv tournament play anymore tbh.
Damn. 30k. Wtf. I wonder what the split is on that
just adding a bit, Abigail should have been like Juggernaut in standing stance that is slightly kneeling rather than standing fully.
Sam Show is truly a testament to how a good marketing can sell a product even if the product itself is mediocre. That’s playing the cards right.
The gameplay itself is what it is, some may like it, some may hate it. The product itself is 100% not worth a 60$ in this day and age. Online is meh tier at best, modes are barebones, GFX are below average but the artstyle is kinda cool.
But how to market it, taking characters from the main game and selling them as a “Free” DLC is a stroke of genius tbh.
Congrats to SNK, they really reversed KOF14 with that one.
The SF4 scene is still there. But they don’t have good leadership. If you aren’t VSav, ST or 3S, then you don’t have good community people who know what legit grassroot stuff is all about.
They’re slowly getting their shit together though. The side tourney at Combo Breaker 2019 had 54, CEO had 35, Evo is likely to have a lot.
Yeah you could random people out through sheer lab work, but SF4 was heavy on the neutral. Super heavy on it. Look back at old matches and just time how much time is spent fighting over space. You could do more with playing solid in SF4 because it was hard to force yourself in through force of will in a character’s moveset. You weren’t going to dash in easy, you couldn’t spend one bar on a hella fast EX move that left you + on block etc.
Hell I’ve watched more replays of SF4 finals than I have of SF5 finals during SF5s run.
Its obvious people like it. I’ve come to the conclusion that in some level I really like SF5 despite being garage. People are definitely willing to be a lot more lowkey about SF4’s shitty things than SF5 shitty. SF5 shitty is usually “oh no, I have to take this 50/50”, SF4 shitty was “oh no, how do I open up somebody who can crouch tech + probably has some other garbage OS on top of it and maybe backdash”.
Remember, I guess it doesn’t matter than an OS cover 4 different options as long as it doesn’t cover 5.
There’s a couple of things going on:
SF5 sucks.
Because SF5 sucks, people are exploring all the other GREAT games going all over the scene. In a lot of ways the SF4 crowd sort of matured and now understand why the FGC is awesome and a headache: great games all over the place.
Even if SF5 was amazing, you’d still have T7, KoF 14 (which is legit great), UNIST, Xrd 2, BBTag etc. There’s just hella good games to play right now. Kids in the FGC have it amazing.
As a scene overall, we did a terrible job of explaining how the FGC actually functioned for decades:
Most of the time you’re playing casuals locally.
Then y’all take trips together to regional tourneys most often.
You plan for 1 major or maybe 2 if you could afford it.
Instead you get people who go to majors before locals. But we also did a really bad job of passing really emphasizing the ground level organization. Big tournaments took more and more focus because of streams. So it sort of distorted the whole of how the scene functioned to newcomers.
Smash is one of the 5-6 pillar IPs of every modern Nintendo console since 64. So you have the most obnoxious fanbase guaranteed to buy one of the 10 worthwhile games that are going to come out for their consoles each gen. But Smash games relatively have little competition for their space. You have Rivals of Aether et al, but smash players like nintendo characters too much to try anything else. So smashers stay in smash and their whole scene is basically 2 games.
Guess how crazy the FGC would be if all of our numbers were only on 2 games?
I’ve been hesitant, but I may pick up Samsho and learn a bit. A lot of my local peeps are giving it lots of praise and it’s getting a lot of support online.
Kinda biding my time for that red head dlc dude that looked cool. Automatic main.
Just be sure you are comfortable with a decidedly last gen online experience.
The solo options are lacking, and it’s really not a lab game.
Same here. I tried to organize an SFV tournament for my local scene, even though I don’t like the game, but had to cancel the whole thing because only eleven(!) people (including me) registered. Compare that to the grass-roots SFIV tournament organized over here that brought in people from all over Europe.
SFV is less popular than SFIV, period. If you disagree, it’s because you are biased towards SFV. And no, I’m not biased; SFIV isn’t even my favorite SF, HF and ST are. I’m not, however, going to pretend that they’re the standard-bearers for the series (although ST would have a shout for that).
If you disagree, it’s because you are biased towards SFV. And no, I’m not biased
Fucking lol. 
Local scene entrants are in a decline for every game and online is good now. We’ll likely never see Local entrants at the numbers we saw years ago. Also SFV majors and evo see more entrants than SFIV.
So no, SFV is not less popular than IV. With YouTube, Twitch, Twitter and discord there’s no way you could argue this. Those are the real facts.
SFIV has sold 7.7 million copies, while SFV sits at a meager 2.9 to date. Even if we take into account that SFV is console-exclusive and not yet at the end of its life cycle, it’s pretty clear which one is more popular. Never mind that SFIV was launched in the dark ages of the fighting game genre and didn’t have the promotion behind it that SFV had.
SF5 is def less popular it’s just gets more eyes on it than sf4 does because of things like twitchand the Esports push, red bull etc etc.
But the game is no where near as popular as sf4 (and I hate sf4) or really any other fighter.
SF is the most popular fighter in the fgc… (outside of smash) but SF5 is not a popular game over all.
Naw, his “little bubble” is the same as mine. And “my” little bubble is pretty big because I played in SoCal and out here in Perth Australia (aka Timbuktu) sf5 is pretty much hated over sf4. No one wants to play sf4 anymore but that’s NOT because they don’t like it. It’s because that game is seen as dated when a newer version is out and when there are no longer any tournies for it.
Plus the game isn’t super playable with rust since execution IS a huge factor in sf4.
Outside of this forum and the top player shills that are placing in tournies (or hope to one day place in tournies) I rarely hear people say sf5 is a good or great game. Most old heads seem to be waiting on sf6 or have simply gotten out of the fighting game community.
The local sf5 seen out here is probably around 5-10 players or so. The local sf4 seen out here was around 20-25 before sf5 dropped. That dropped off dramatically in the first 6 months of sf5.
In SoCal as well the scene has dropped off dramatically for my friends that played sf4.
SFV is relegated to side game status tbh. We still pull anywhere between 30-50 people for Tekken, but we just can’t do multi-game tournaments anymore.
I’m not even sure if it’s a good or a bad thing that the Team Nordavind-boys don’t show up for anything local anymore. On one hand they would give the community something to work against and could give valuable input to the intermediate players, but they’re also so much better than everyone else that it’s not even funny since they’re literally getting paid to play SFV.
IV had multiple releases and wasn’t stuck on a single console. V would’ve easily closed the gap had it released on Xbox. But even on one console you can look at how V is washing IV in entrants.
Always more and more excuses about why people don’t play the supposed superior game. MvC2 is dated, Hell 3rd strike and CvS2 are dated and see hella play. Fuck that noise. If IV was so great and so popular people would play it. But nope, peeps rather whine bout SFV and the praise the glory days of IV.
Chun from back in the day.
SFIV sold 3.5 millions copies in its vanilla edition. Adding up the sales from the expansions is bound to be misleading because those are not unique sales, most of them were people who already bought vanilla having to buy the new edition to stay up to date.
Still, more than SFV, but not to that degree.
SFIV stans are just as bad as the MvCI stans. Always talk about how great their game is but nobody fucking plays it and they constantly got an excuse as to why.
Fucking smashers drag around crtvs, the real crack players never put down MvC2, 3rd strike never died, etc.
Y’all some fucking phonies.
Sometimes I’d sit back and laugh at the Tweets from people talkin about how much they miss SF4 even though they were the same ones saying how much they hated the fuckin game.
I miss a lot of normals. Hawk’s st.roundhouse, Rolento st.mp etc.
A lot of normals felt good to hit.
