Well this weeks JP sales have been really bad.
Just 11,000 units… -73 %
I’m really not sure what you’re asking here. By most accounts, the game plays well, is well balanced and entertaining, and is a fine competitive product.
At the end of the day, that’s what matters. Especially for the “competitive crowd”.
Killer Instinct had similar ranking issues at launch and had times during the first season where it took abysmally long to find people to play. Doesn’t mean that game wasn’t primarily focused on competitive play (and with the lacking single player content to this day, still pretty much is).
Capcom could do a better job, sure, but I doubt too many people who are competitive are legitimately saying “I don’t feel like I’m being catered” to. The competitive MKX players surely weren’t being catered enough to when they had to wait a whole year for netcode that didn’t make it hard to react or combo correctly even with people who lived near you. They also killed off their most viable eSports presence by completely abandoning content for the PC version.
If 6 months go by and we are in a similar state as far as online functionality, then yeah sure we just simply aren’t being catered to. Right now we are in no worse a state than other fighters were at launch especially considering almost none of those games had quite as solid netcode at launch either. Right now it’s just singling them out for mistakes that other fighting games also had trouble with at launch.
Even Skullgirls had a troubled launch where the console versions were experiencing weird slow down online even during solid pings.
Problem is even at EVO and such a lot of casuals comprise spectators. This is true at EVO, twitch, etc, and generally they do a huge amount to help spread the positive word about the game. That becomes an issue for the competitive scene, as if the game is not getting the spectatorship numbers that sponsors and tournament organisers require to run events and provide big prize pools. Gradually, this lack of mainstream popularity will cause even the games competitive audience to shrink.
At the moment everything is fine because there’s little competition, most casuals have moved on from games like MKX, but when a new, bigger more mainstream focused fighting game arrives, much of the audience may shift away and with them goes a portion of the competitive community. There are plenty of competitive players that just play the most popular games, and they too will shift alongside the figures for spectatorship.
Unfortunately the only answer is for Capcom to chase that casual audience, and the best way for them to do so, will be to rerelease and rebrand the game as a complete package at the begging of next year. Otherwise, I guess the game will be down to little beyond a focused competitive community within 2~ years.
What a shame too, because beyond SFV’s launch issues is a rather remarkable fighting game. I really feel that this is the culmination of the SF franchise, the best the series ever been.
You compare KI to SF? For real now. Not even counting the fact it is on a platform lacking a lot behind the one SFV is released.
Well, I don’t want to sound negative, but that’s going to happen anyway. It’s what always happens with fighting games, they don’t tend to maintain large casual playerbases over time.
l
USF IV, the 4th installment, has sold as much in its second week…
That’s true, but immaterial to what I said. Look at USF4’s play numbers as time went on, that’s what fighting games always do. None of them maintain large casual playerbases over time.
He compares SFV to KI because both games share the same business model and KI base already went through the troubles this game is currently in. KI had doom and gloom in during season 1. The lack of updates, matchmaking not working as intended, problem with ragequits (KI problem being that it didn’t work properly) and lack of content. KI was in this position and devs couldn’t say for certain that the game would even get a season 2. KI is a less popular IP exclusive to an unpopular console and it was a digital only game and it managed to succeed and eagerly awaiting it’s third season and PC launch later this month. KI can get through a rocky start then SFV definitely can.
KI never was sold for 60 bucks.
Nah I don’t see people straying from SFV competitively once it starts to really get around. SFV has had one of the most abysmal launches SF has ever had, yet the competitive players are still too stupid to not give record attendance to SF at Evo with over 3,000 participants and counting. Which means it will likely surpass Smash attendance at Evo. Those big dummehs.
Marvel 3 at one time had more participants/viewers than SFIV and that was about the only game that actually surpassed it. Another Capcom game that was also ridiculed by public for X reasons. SFxT came out and had a chance to knock both SFIV and Marvel 3 off the map as far as competitors and viewers, but they luckily botched their launch super hard and that game was at least 5 times more of a clusterfuck to play competitively on and offline than SFV was. At least you don’t have to deal with a slew of people who can automatically block everything you can do in SFV because they attached the correct gem to themselves. Evo also screwed up by making the first tournament at Evo for XTekken a team only tournament which probably kept a lot of people who might have been interested out of competing.
Ever since Ultra SFIV came out nothing has been able to top its attendants at tournaments. Mortal Kombat X was able to trounce its twitch viewership for a couple months, but now is mostly surpassed again at tournaments by Ultra. MKX as popular as it was never could beat Ultra SFIV for tourney attendants AFAIK. Meaning the chances of ANYTHING surpassing SFV’s tourney numbers in the next 6 years is 0. Some NRS game will probably get more twitch viewers during majors for 2 months, then fall off.
Of course, it’s still a fighting game and should be put under the same scrutiny. It was on a platform that people thought was spying on you while you smoked weed so that was even harder to convince anyone to buy. At least with SFV you can tell them that Sony isn’t going to watch you smoke weed in your boxers/panties.
You’re right. It was sold for 500 bucks since you needed to upgrade to a new console to purchase it. That’s why people joked around about the Xbox One and called it the “Killer Instinct” machine or “the Neo Geo” cabinet. People made fun of you for being rich enough to buy a 500 dollar system to play a small portion of a to be later robust game. It’s not like SFV where there are already 20 something million people sitting in houses with a PS4 or millions more with a solid PC rig.
Doesn’t matter. They charged for a game that wasn’t done and couldn’t guarantee it would ever be finished. Investing into KI was a complete crapshoot. Couple with digital only and Xbone getting an awful rep right out the gate it had a lot more to overcome.
Good thing PS4’s are free.
They’re in a shit load more homes now than PS4 was at launch and their price point is at least 150 dollars lower than Xbone was at launch. More people have PS4’s very much so because it was a more powerful system for 100 less. It’s 2 years from next gen launch. It’s much more likely you or friend has a next gen system in their house and has been likely for years that they have a good enough PC to run SFV.
If your game releases on the launch of a new platform it effectively takes on the price of that platform.
Comparing KI’s launch and SFV’s launch is stupid. One game was free, the other was a full $60 retail game. Giving SFV a pass because it follows Ki’s model while actually costing money to get into is just fucking stupid. I expect issues with a free to play game, and have no problems giving the devs time to address them. I have serious issues with paying full price for a game and getting the same, if not worse problems than the freebie had. I mean damn, people.
I’m going to copy a comparison I made between DoA5’s launch content, and SFV’s launch content to once again show why people are so angry over this:
**Dead or Alive 5 launched with a $60 retail price, it had\has the following options upon start-up. Remember, I’m only using DoA5 vanilla, not Ultimate, Core Fighter, or Last Round.
Story mode: Fully voiced, with full in-game cinematics used for story telling. This took 1-2 hours to complete.
Offline Versus, Solo or Tag Battle options
Arcade Mode, solo or tag battle options, with EIGHT difficulty settings.
Time Attack, solo or tag battle options, with EIGHT difficulty settings.
Survival, solo or tag battle options, with EIGHT difficulty settings.
Team Fight, using up to 7 characters.
Training mode had 4 options, Free Training, Command Training, Tutorial, and Combo Challenge.
Online Mode, with Rank(solo and tag) Lobby Match(solo and tag) with I believe up to 16 players in the lobby.
Fighter List, add any player you’ve played via a couple button presses to your list for quick invites to any type of fight.
Unlockable costumes for the entire cast, with 2-5 different face/hair options per costume.
Unlockable titles.
Spectator Mode
Album for taking pics…on the PS3 release.
Movies
Detailed fight record, wins/losses, percentage of high/mid/low attacks, percentage of…pretty much every stat.
(DoA5 online also punishes rage quitters. You quit/disconnect, the other player not only gets the win and the points, but the quitter/disconnected player gets the loss/loses the points. Everyone should copy this system.)
SFV launched with:
Story mode…that is one round, 2-3 fights per character. Takes maybe 5 minutes to complete. Tops.
Survival Mode
Online: Ranked, Casual, and Battle Lounge for ONLY 2 players. Of course, after 4-5 betas…you couldn’t even play online for the first few days.
Training Mode.
(Online doesn’t punish rage quitters, in anyway. Hence, the RQ epidemic we have going on right now.)
…that’s it.
DoA5 isn’t the only fighting game with a $60 price tag to offer a wealth of single player, online, and offline versus game modes for players of all levels, casual to hardcore.**
Now, I’m going to give another comparison, one far to old for some of you kiddies.
In September 2001, Sega released it’s second online NFL game for the Dreamcast, NFL 2k2. The previous years version had no way to deter people from rage quitting. This was also a time when patching a console game was simply unheard of. However, the next year Sega implemented a disconnect percentage for players to have some idea if that person they were about to play had a habit of quitting games. Far from perfect, but it was something.
That was 15 fucking years ago on a doomed(though amazing!) console. For crying out loud, Capcom’s previous SF game, SF4 had something to counter quitters. How the fuck is this an issue in 2016?
One more thing: I see retards defending this garbage by saying it’s because of Arcade mode not being here. That’s fucking dumb. Look at the bold, seriously understand it, now understand there are even more issues with the game then just a lack of Arcade mode. That’s the issue.
Not having an Arcade mode in a fighting game in 20-fucking-16 is like a 1st\3rd person shooter with multiplayer not having Deathmatch. It’s such a standard expectation gamers for decades have come to expect from the genres, free to play, budget titles and fully priced retail games combined.
That arcade mode? The standard that it is? It was Capcom themselves who set that standard. Jesus people, stop defending this garbage.
(goes back to playing SFV)
Yup pretty much.
Not to mention in order to convince someone to buy KI you had to tell them to buy the system where the NRS spies on you. That was tough. As opposed to SFV where it’s 2 years later so there’s a huge install base already for PS4 and an even larger install base for PC.
When people talk about SFV they only talk about the 60 bucks you pay (37.99 on PC cdkeys). You hear only the poorest call it a 400 dollar game. If you go back into my time travel machine to December 2013 and talk to someone at a tournament or casually about KI what would they say? Not “oh awesome free game? lemme get in that ASS it looks FUN!!”
Nope this is what you got “damn brooo, I can’t pay 500 dollars for a quarter of a game, I’m out”. You were spoken to as if you were a stock broker or lawyer hyping up his new Aston Martin.
…your not seriously suggesting that the consoles price tag is in any way relevant to this discussion are you? No, really, your not serious?
Man, folks who spent a couple grand to play SFV with max setting on PC must be fucking enraged with that logic.
Your grasping at straws. GTFO.
The “free” version of KI only lets you play one character that always rotates. You’ll not gonna get what you want unless you pimp money into it. Free my ass.
KI is like what would happen if YOU HAD to max out your PC just to play a game. It came out during the launch of next gen which means you are forced into a position where you have to spend money. There are most likely some computers that are just one grade above a toaster that can at least run SFV. Maxing out your PC to run SFV at 4K is your personal preference and your own frivolous use of money.
Even if you bought a 2,000 dollar gaming rig in October 2013, it’s now November 2013 and you have to spend 500 more dollars to play KI. There’s no grasping at straws. It was reality. People called it the 500 dollar video game for a reason. You were looked at as a crazy person for buying a next gen system on DAY ONE (forced 500 dollar purchase) just to play budget fighter.
Whereas people have had 2 years to get the money ready for SFV at launch. It was no surprise launch thing and you still at least have legacy support for PS4 so you don’t have to buy a new stick (unless you’re going to Evo). KI required you to spend 500 + an extra 200 for a limited supply of arcade sticks from Mad Catz or Razer. I remember some people literally having to wait months to play on stick as more stock came in. Your only alternative was to learn to mod or find someone to mod your stick. Or just stick to pad like J.Wong and Chris G did LOL
Apparently SFV cost me $1,600 because I have to count the cost of my computer. Sounds like a bad deal compared to KI which launched with voice support and social features.