It was last I checked, but I’m not against it having 200 more people than a broken PC port that couldn’t even be turned on by a lot of players. If it couldn’t pull that off it’d truly be dead in the water.
It’s not a lie that digital sales in Japan aren’t a big thing, and PC sales in japan are even less of one. I really doubt PC sales would make a material impact there.
there are around ~750k players listed in ranked Leaderboard
PC sales according to SteamSpy are around ~125k: http://steamspy.com/app/310950
hopefully sales pickup once Capcom pumps more content into the game…
We need the upcoming EVO to be the ‘hypest’ ever.
Do whe know if of all those 750k players all have a legit copy? Do pirated pc copies of the game can join the online?
So looking at it objectively, taking a step back - why is game failing? I know, lack of content is the major flaw that some people like to point out, but I just want to point out every potential reason. Especially for the “average” gamer, who would like to get the bang for buck out of the game only to feel robbed of their money.
A proper tutorial is one of the most crucial things to nailing a fighting game, you need to give the player the resources with a reasonable amount of hand-holding so they can grasp the concepts of the game and go on to learn them independently. This game however, does not successfully do that at all.
Online components being semi-functional.
Why in the hell they weren’t prepared to maintain their servers with a team of specialists on day one is beyond me. Day one server issues are passable, but having issues still up to now is beyond incompetent and has probably made a large majority get a refund on their game. Battle lounges still don’t function as intended, searching for them is a nightmare and a lot of players flags/names don’t load upon joining your lobby. Disgraceful on their behalf, it’s been almost a month.
Survival.
Aside from the mode itself being equivalent to Capcom putting you in an endless limbo, the rewards and pay off for actually completing the mode are pitiful. Colours? That just isn’t a worthwhile investment of time for playing something so lazily put together. Better rewards should have been created to properly compensate the player for their investment of time.
Price tag.
The price tag for this game, regardless of future content is too high. People are not aware of the ongoing updates this game will receive, it hasn’t been publicly advertised well enough. In a time where F2P games such as League, DOTA, Hearthstone and other successful F2P titles thrive with astronomically high playerbases it isn’t going to be well received when you release a full retail game that uses their model. The idea itself seems strange, it’s a free to play model with a price tag? And the price tag it came with is way way too much, it should have been half of it’s price considering the games actual content and re-playability.
Capcoms track record post 2005/2006
Lets be honest with each other, aside from a small amount of games that were well received from a sales standpoint, Capcoms track record and public standard has been taking a nose dive with shitty release after shitty release, cut content, disc locked content, generally bad games. Don’t get me wrong, my personal opinion is that they still crank out some fun games - Dragon’s Dogma, Dead Rising, Monster Hunter, RE5, DMC4. A lot of their customers have probably moved on due to poor reception of their releases probably. For instance I myself stopped purchasing Ubisoft titles around 6 months before Watch Dogs released due to their consistent releases of unfinished titles riddled with bugs and deceptive advertising. Capcom are in a similar state, especially after pissing off some of their fanbases with garbage titles or cancellations - RE6 & MegaMan being stand-outs of this. Their sales records haven’t been incredible for a while but if SF5 hasn’t actually cracked the 1-million mark yet that’s a big issue. I imagine it has though, it seems far-fetched that it couldn’t.
I mean it’s not like Capcom is lacking reasons as to why their game isn’t being well received even without the poor reviews. If I had any regular non-FGC gamer friends who were recommending a fun fighting game to play I’d currently recommend Mortal Kombat X over SFV, the value for money is much better and it’s easier to grasp. That’s a problem if it can’t compete with it’s competitor.
Seriously thinking about quitting this game, if it doesn’t pick up steam. Don’t want to spend the next 7 years playing with 300 people.
I think it was mainly first week bad press that can easily kill a game these days. Mob lynch mentality has already formed and there is little to do right now.
Admittedly Capcom brought it into themselves by not adding the most basic singleplayer modes but its a pity that most consumers are not able to look at the good game that SF5 is even behind all its lack of content.
It reminds me (to a minor degree) to all the shit Skullgirls got because it didnt had an ingame move list.
It’s not that this game will only have 300 players online soon. The hardcore community will always be there for this game but capcom missed a big opportunity to capture the casual crowd.
That vicious cycle has always fascinated me. If a game has a large initial player base it just snowballs from there and continues to grow because people feel like they can jump in at anytime because there will always be people to play. Even if they are not the biggest fans of the game. The fact that there’s massive player base of people to play draws them in.
But if a game doesn’t have a large initial player base then that game is doomed. Because people will feel like “I don’t want to waste money on a game no one is playing” And because so many people share that mentality, yeah no one will be playing it lol. This mentality is truly amazing. The only way to break that cycle is for a dedicated group to just say. Fuck the crowd. We like this game so we are gonna playing among ourselves. And maybe just maybe. Others will see them playing and want to join in.
Indeed.
It’s funny to me that the core players kept playing SF4 even when it had hardly anyone else on, but SF5 gets a little bad press - but still has high concurrent player numbers, and still far better sales than many other FGC games, even if we by the “doom and gloom” numbers that have been tossed around - and people are out there giving it the SC2 “ded gaem” jokes already.
Not to mention the simple reality that if you’re playing fighting games, you’re entering into a fairly small community. That’s the reality of it. Lets not pretend that it was some gigantic e-sports community before SF5 and now it’s dead.
Eh, I think constant updates, content, and community interaction tools are what drives population up more than initial player bases (which are still a factor but not as heavy). Only way to grow this game is to give it post-launch support the likes of which no fighting game in existence has ever received.
There’s dedicated crowds for ST and 3S for many years, and try to hop online in those games…
Making new acquaintances, going to tournaments with a lot of other fans, having dedicated forums bustling with activity are all stuff I’m interested in when playing a competitive multiplayer game.
If I wanted this poverty-ass level of exposure and player base, I would have kept playing 3S or ST on fightcade.
My outlook on the future wouldn’t be as bleak as it is if not for retarded public announcements like “Send us your ragequitter videos” or “If you rq 80-90% of the time you’ll get a kind slap on your hands, otherwise you’re fine” and stuff like online being in the state that it is now after 5 betas and a couple of stress tests.
It’s not just the game itself that’s worrying me, since it is fine. It’s the level of incompetence Capcom and their officials are displaying that makes me lose all hope.
That is actually what gets me. I don’t understand how SF has the level of passion, excitement and joy in its player base that it has (a community I really like, mind you) while Capcom seems riddled with incompetence that would make an Indy developer look half-assed. This is some bizarre perfect storm of raw stupidity and short-sighted corporate greed at Capcom.
I don’t really get the hate about asking people to send in proof of ragequitters. It’s no different than reporting abuse in any other game, yet everyone flipped their shit in this case.
How the fuck can you not have an automated system for this shit like every other fucking game?
Why do I have to go out of my fucking way and record every single one of my matches, then send it to a fucking retard that only resets the points of people who got 80-90 percent disconnect rates?
Are you for real?
Have you checked like every other multiplayer online game like Starcraft 2, Dota 2, League of Legends how they deal with cheaters?
Yeah they got automated systems like VAC, Warden or other shit. This isn’t even a case of traditional cheating, every other fighting game has simple punishes for morons who like to quit in place already.
But hey cheating is something that they also can’t handle as is proven by that Ryu-Bot running through the top 10 of players at the moment.
Why isn’t shit like that part of the game, and why didn’t it get patched 3 days after release?
Why do I have to work on something that Capcom fucked up?
It’s pretty easy to understand.
Ragequitting is the bare minimum expected bad behavior for a player in ANY fighting game with online ranked gameplay throughout the history of video game time.
The fact that Capcom didn’t even take this into consideration pisses people off because it makes Capcom seem totally disinterested in actually providing rewarding, consistent ranked online experience for its competitive players that it is (supposedly) catering to with this release. To then release a statement saying “Hey do the majority of the work tracking and reporting this stuff and maybe we’ll sorta kinda do something about this” is bullshit to a lot of people because this is extra work that SHOULD have been totally mitigated by Capcom having an ounce of common sense when designing their online rank system.
Now, if Capcom had something more like “We just built a tool to flag people getting a lot of disconnects in ranked matches and have a team reviewing fight data to punish people that are clearly abusing the ranking system to advance until we can get out a full fix in the next patch” that would have gone over a lot better. Unfortunately, I believe their architecture and data-capture online is so shitty that Capcom can’t even do something like this. I mean, hell, they can’t even get OUR OWN data to display properly on our screen after…what? 47 betas? So, really, people got mad because, once again, Capcom shifted the onus from themselves having to bust their own asses and put in extra work to compensate for their own laziness and/or poor decision making to the player base to report on something that explicitly should not be happening in the first place if not for Capcom’s stupidity.
This is all a part of the reason I laugh my ass off at people claiming this bare bones release is supposed to be specifically for the competitive crowd. There is ZERO evidence in the game that this is true because its competitive support is absolute garbage.
As a temporary measure? No, I don’t see it being that awful.
I mean, they admitted it’s an issue, too. It’s not like they said, “We’re never doing anything about it, fuck you, send in videos if you’re so mad.”
As for VAC bans, yeah…a player reports another player, and then a group of other players have to review the replay to determine if there was cheating.
Well, I think they’re referring to stuff like EVO when they talk about the “competitive crowd”. Does anyone even think the online leaderboards are some kind of legitimate competitive thing?
There’s a video of Arthuro playing sets against the then #1 rank player and being severely disappointed how free he was. Guy couldn’t even take a round.
rage quitters are just funny, its lag switchers that piss me off
So in what way was this release geared for the competitive crowd? Wouldn’t a more thorough showing of investment for that crowd been to release the game later (gonna hazard a wild idea here and say “When it was actually done”) but make available this build for competition use free of charge? Just a notion from me and, please keep in mind, I’m just a guy that’s worked on video games, not someone that’s part of a multi-million dollar company desperately setting fire to the goodwill of their player base.