Is it the primary reason? Hell no…but that doesn’t change the fact that it feeds into the impression people get from the game. It is a symptom of the problems that people viscerally feel with the game.
The argument also doesn’t hold particularly well. I mean…why even have them then? Just remove alt costumes all-together. They aren’t important right? Hell, remove AI while we’re at it and just have a PVP VS mode, Online and Training modes…and that’s it. Have literally nothing else in the game. Not even alt-colors. Just P1 and P2 colors.
How much has to be stripped out of the game before people defending this game as a $60 product would say “Okay this is ridiculous…”? What if it released with 8 characters? 2? If super moves weren’t in the game and were going to be implemented later? Think about that and then realize that it seems like A LOT of peoples threshold for “ridiculous” just happens to be higher than yours based on their own experience with games competing for their time and money. That is the backlash Capcom is now experiencing. They hit the mark FAR below peoples “ridiculous” threshold. That is not the consumers fault. They are not to blame. Their expectations have been set both by Capcom (since SF4 was a more robust release) and especially by Capcom’s competition (both within the fighting genre and outside it). If Capcom fails to meet that expectation and suffers because of it that is on them. That is Capcom, as a company, failing to do their market research, failing to develop appropriately, and failing to provide product-value. Simple as that.
So is one alternate costume worth complaining about a “beta release”? No, but a shop coming a month later…rage-quitting penalties coming at an undisclosed later date…a story mode launching in summer…trials coming after release…all those things and more? Those all together are worth complaining about a “beta release” I’d say.
Well, “It’s not worth quitting over” isn’t quite the same as “Eh, just remove them altogether”.
I agree that it looks bad in terms of image. But the core of the game exists, and it’s good. Everything else would be nice to have right now, but it’s not central to the experience and it IS coming.
Right. And for me that might be fine…for casuals however? They’re going to jump ship over shit like this. That’s just a fact. Small releases like a story mode (apparently no one cares about that anyway according to SRK) and a shop and trials and single characters seems like a terrible way to convince people to stick around. Bigger, chunkier releases that offer A LOT at once seems to bring people back. Hence expansions and such in other games. For even that model to work, however, you need initial player investment. I fear Capcom has squandered the opportunity to create that initial investment from the casual player base.
The funny part about all of this…while I’m getting bitched at for being a “hater” and hurting the game by some, I’ve actively been encouraging multiple friends to buy the game because I know they’ll have fun with it…but I’m fighting the bad press that Capcom themselves have earned in the mainstream. Ugh!
Ah, interesting. So there are a few people (myself included) who bought the game and have yet to go online. Granted, it might be a very small number (my wild guess is no more than 150 people), but it (kind of) adds to the number 600,000+ who bought the game
Indeed, first impressions and all that. That’s why I commented earlier that releasing without Story Mode was a mistake, even if it isn’t actually central to the experience that the core audience generally buys these games for.
I think there’s a mistake in terms here. What is the ‘core audience’? Is it the tiny fraction of buyers that sticks around for years? Plays every fighting game? Just every Capcom game? That tunes into streams? Is that audience large enough to actually support these kinds of titles? And where does that ‘core audience’ come from? If the games aren’t made to recruit new players then wouldn’t that audience dwindle over time until it’s gone completely?
Is someone who buys the game because of flashy characters, nostalgia for the 90’s, and an expectation of a fun arcade experience with maybe a little bit of playing with friends outside of the ‘core audience’? Isn’t it the game designers job to make a game so fun that THAT person sticks around for years and starts to tune into streams? Is that persons 60 dollars and investment less valuable because they don’t already know what a crush counter is by following some random youtube channel?
Is the core audience not the majority of players who buy, but the minority of lifers, clearly too small to support the game but certainly willing to buy it? It’s kind of silly to consider the core audience to only be people that already play fighting games. When you cater to people with low expectations and do nothing to recruit new users your community dies. Given that SFV peaked at 4734 players on steam today maybe they should have paid a little more attention to the actual core audience and not the loud but tiny hardcore one.
In general I mean, “People who would enjoy a good, competitive fighting game”. And I think Capcom did a good job attracting those people. I don’t know what else they could offer that would better attract that demographic.
As for everyone else, I dunno what they want, or if catering to other demographics even makes sense.
I do agree that the image given to the “general gaming world” with how the release was handled isn’t good, though.
I think the core audience is ‘people who enjoy a good fighting game’. But those people aren’t ‘people who know how to play fighting games and know what they’re buying’. They could very well come in for the story and flashy fun stuff that is low commitment and low barrier to entry only to stick around forever and become monsters. Your job is to turn people into hardcore players, not to only serve the pre existing audience.
The point isn’t to attract that demographic. The point is to create that demographic with solid single player offerings that guide people into multiplayer where they can become genre converts. You don’t get someone into a game by making the experience for them awful.
(Also they could have done a million things to make the game less garbage for hardcore players, from voice support to lobbies to a useable friend management system to a UI that isn’t worst in class, etc)
People are paying multiple PSN plus fees for multiple accounts just to troll people?
Fun fact: I was super into VF for like a year, but eventually stopped caring because only 10 people in the USA played it and they were unbearably toxic people even by internet standards. And this is unrelated to what was just posted about trolling an unpopular game, but that totally fits the bill.
Don’t get me wrong though, all online communities are awful, but at least 3S people don’t hate their own game.
Also, in regards to this…as best as I can tell, SF4’s all-time highest peak on Steam was 5,472 players and consistently went down from there.
Compare that to a game like CS:GO, which has been pretty consistently high. It’s all-time peak was 823,694 and their average for February was 376,285 with a peak of 738,969 for that month.
DOTA is even higher than that by quite a margin.
Fighting games just don’t get the same kind of traction on Steam that other genres do. Not by a looong shot. (Granted, those numbers don’t account for consoles, but even if you generously multiply them by a factor of 10, it’s still far behind)
All time concurrent peak for MKX was almost 14k. That’s MKX. On PC. Where it is hugely broken. Being more than 3 times higher than SFV at its launch peak.
Yeah, you’re right about that, MKX on PC had a horrible reputation right from the start it seemed. Given that Mortal Kombat has always seemed to have a higher cultural penetration due to the spectacle of it all, I actually would have expected it to have much higher numbers than a SF game, but that’s not what happened it seems.
But I do think we mostly agree here, the poor image that SF5 seems to have right now - even if it’s not nearly as warranted as MKX’s negative image in my opinion - is surely not helping it.
I really doubt there are enough people doing that to have any noticeable effect on the player numbers. Like, if every top ranked player in the scene had 3 accounts it wouldn’t dent 650 thousand.
(Granted, those numbers don’t account for consoles, but even if you generously multiply them by a factor of 10, it’s still far behind)