What if we advertised on the games themselves? Sort of like how blizzard advertises their games and happenings on battle.net.
I’ve been thinking alot about this lately, and to be honest, I feel that the newer generation gamers of today are becomming increasingly more lazy, yet more demanding which is annoying and frustrating. They don’t want games to be difficult, they don’t want to learn A, B, C, D, and so on, they just want to jump from A to Z asap, gamers today lack the devotion to want to play fighting games indepth. Fighting Games lose out in my opinion not just because of lack of appeal but because for the average gamer now a days, it takes more effort to play compared to other games such as FPS.
I have to agree, FPS do get alot of great sponsors for their FPS which drives more people to play, which is something that the FG community lacks. I feel that for many of you fighting gamers whom live in large cities where the community is still thriving and going, that you should try to be more public with the tournaments that are held for fighting games. Not only that but I feel that we as a fighting game community have got to stop riding on some of our ego pride and communicate with the noobs and the scrubs, and not hound them because of one ill or stupid question, because lets face it, that will deter new players from wanting to become part of this community…where we not all once scrubs and noobs?
The main thing is to display our “products” publicily! People aren’t going to join if they don’t see anything happening, we definetly have alot of great things to show. We don’t always neccessarily need “High Sponsors” to make things happen, all it takes is more effort with doing it yourself and spreading the word of the community, maybe even getting a News Crew to come and get an interview during the tournament, I mean, it’s not much, but it’s a start and could lead to something big. If general gamers can wow at what happens in WoWIII, FPS games when played, they would surely drop their jaws if they saw a footage of JWong’s 1 Pixel Comeback to Victory, fighting games has everything that is needed to be successful. Good Players, competetion, drama (Some Battles can go back and forth for some great action), hype, rivalries…dude, you could make a soap opera out of this, it’s just that we need to get more public with this instead of just “within the community”.
Just my two cents:nunchuck:
As long as there are fighting game communities like srk and the apex system around i think there will always be competition. but like all things nothing last forever if capcom doesn’t realease something new. but i think competition for fighting game will never die.
There are 3 other types of games that can be considered to be professionally competitive: Madden, FPS, and RTS.
Madden is an anomaly, which is only because nearly everybody in America loves football, and they can draw on tons of cash and press from the NFL. As for other the other popular sports game, Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution, non-Americans love soccer and draw on that instead of the actual value of the videogame… so we should really look at the other genres.
First of all, I think fighters have become amazingly complicated. Look at Guilty Gear XX. There are about 4 different meters on the screen and each one has a different function and it takes a lot of time to learn how each one works and how to maximize it, and only then can you really get into the strategy portion of the game. And if you don’t know how to use the Burst Meter of how to FRC consistently, you will feel like you don’t know enough.
On the other hand, take what is considered a “pseudo” fighter like Super Smash Brothers Melee. The controls are pretty simple. There are a few concepts that have escaped “conventional” play like wavedashing, SHFFLing, and so forth, but they’re not obvious and psychologically, knowing your basic arsenal makes you believe that you’re pretty good.
I believe that fighters nowadays take too much time to make players think that they’re doing pretty well, because they’re buried in too many complex systems. The only real solution is to make the game look and appear simple; that’s where I think 3D Fighters have an advantage over 2D ones… there’s just a lifebar and a bunch of strings.
Second, the availability of FPS and RTS usually makes it easier to match up with players of your skill level. Blizzard’s Battle.net ladder for WC3 was incredibly fun since most of the time, you would play against people around your skill level. FPS is even more so, because if you’re getting destroyed on one server you can just hop around to the next. This encourages competition, because it’s much more fun when you feel that you can win, and IMO, you learn more.
When most casual players (like… I dunno, magazine reviewers) go to the arcade, they’ll get their asses handed to them in record time without getting to learn what’s going on, mostly because the people at the arcade know quite a bit about the game and it’s hard to develop the patience to stick around.
To increase the level of casual competitiveness, online play is pretty key, and if not that, some sort of offline matchmaking service should be available where you can look up other gamers that want to play against other people, and this service should be heavily advertised so that mainstream can get into it… it’d be even better if the company itself spearheaded this sort of thing.
Third, 2D fighting games need to look better. Those sprites for CFE look awful; if they weren’t recycled they weren’t anything special. I don’t even care if they were drawn in 3D but played like they were 2D fighters. Ikaruga for DC/GC looked nice but it was really just regular 2D gameplay. That’s the main reason 3D games sell better; they mostly look better, and no matter where you go, image carries a lot of weight. 10-year old Morrigan sprite doesn’t look good no matter which way you swing it.
I don’t agree with the notion that tournaments be advertised more. Tournaments bring out competitive players and make them even more competitive, when the problem is that not enough gamers are playing fighters competively.
Actually this somewhat happened in Japan with Capcom Fighting Jam/Evolution in SBO. It wasn’t a particularly popular game, but since it was annouced as one of the games people had to learn to play it so they could compete in it. Though chances are the purse (if they even have a purse…) was no where near the amount that CPL had, but to get to the point it has happened before and after the event the game died down again.
Personally I don’t really expect to see this problem recitifying anytime soon. One idea that I thought of would be for arcades to include console games. Like SSBM, or Naruto 3 and 4 for the GC. Sure the hardcore players won’t want them on their turf. But how else will you recruit new players? Theory is, is that all of the casual and hardcore GC players will come. While they’re there they’ll obviously see some type of a regular fighting game being played. While watching others play they may get intrigued and start playing. Thing is that hopefully the local expert in MvC2 or whatever doesn’t just decide to squash them like a bug and make them think that they have a chance so they keep on playing.
And at the same time, there’d be a chance that some of those capcom players will watch some Naruto 3 and gain some interests in it and start playing that as well.
But that’ll probably only work if people have an open mind… which knowing this site and some of their members, i’d have a better chance at banging Jessica Simpson.
even third world countries have kofxi before we do.
a damn shame indeed
Although I dont have a solution, I like to point out another problem in the FG community.
The average FG gamer is BROKE
The average FPS gamer has money
I was gona write up alot of stuff on why fighting games cant be big but… Im lazy what it comes down to is. FPS are easier at low level play so people will keep playing them cause they think theyre good and most of the time will never play top level people. Ignorance is bliss they believe they are good cause they can beat their friends and the highschool football team so they will keep playing and now and then a noob might venture off and try to become competitive so the community grows. If a noob is intrested in a fighting game he has to leave his house (GOD FORBID) play infront of others get destroyed cause he has no idea what hes doing. And he will go home and play more halo and CS. And FPS in the US have a big push while fighting games dont :).
wrap
Per my friend’s request, I feel I have no choice but to inject some controversy into this conversation.
So let me get things rolling by saying there aren’t enough rich, educated white men getting ahead in the world today. That, and Dallas Cowboys>>Chicago Bears, but Seahawks are #1 in the NFC.
And that’s why fighting games suck.
The only way i see fg getting more popularity where high up officials/competitive other genre games will notice is if:
And I quote: “A Next-Gen Fighting game where it appeals to graphic whores who love simplicity, and flashiness a.k.a casualis gameris.” “With that added ssbm feel to it yet it has that sf3S depth being added to it.”
So all we need to make a return is something simple enough to the casual peeps to play, but then after time it will get deep enough for us (shoryukenis carnivorous tothechinous) a.k.a fighting gamers to not bash for not having any good non repetitive gameplay qualities. but in reality who would wanna take fighting games this far:mad: honestly if this were to be done i think the community had another 5 or 6 years before another fighting game followed in its footsteps. im fissin to go2 bed now.
I agree entirely. But I can also understand why this has happened. The developers have not been recieving the revenue they need in this growing economy. They are, thus, forced to look back to those who already have experience with fighters. To do that, they must look for ways to accomodate our needs with new and flashier ways to do whatever the hell it is we need to do as well as ways to challenge some of us who are willing to BE challenged. This makes it impossible to obtain NEW revenue, since most beginners would rather be entertained than challenged.
I wish it were that simple. While this was true for games like VF4, SVC was pretty simple, but it was full of bugs. CFJ was an amalgamation of simplicity, yet it LOOKED terrible! The closest thing to an answer that I have is that the gameing community is becoming more introverted due to the advances in home entertainment and its impossible to enjoy a fighting game without competition. The three things Madden, RTS’s and FPS’s have in common and that fighters lack is that their online support is FLAWLESS, their single player replay value is enormous (Skibi’s TD for warcraft is the funnest game EVER) and the game control is not interface specific yet is simple, mostly becuase you only need a mouse or three buttons on a pad, wheras for a fighter life CvS, stick or pad? Which fighters have real oline support? DoA:ultimate, Alpha? HA!
The future of fighting games is in jeopardy. It’s up to those of us with the power to determine whether it lives or dies, since is appears that developers are too busy trying to cater to the needs of the old. They seem to forget our mortality, and our maturity.
People just don’t wanna invest the time in to 2D fighting games anymore.
Besides, the fact that 2D is pretty much dead, most people can barely do a fireball properly, let alone try and think about things like priority, combos, mind-games, etc.
3D fighters attract people because they look pretty, and they don’t usually involve complicated pad motions. Hence why you’ll hear people say that they’ve ‘mastered’ a fighting game because they know all the moves.
Like someone else said, it would take something that looks incredibly good, and appears simple and easy to pick-up for the genre to be revitalized. The closest thing we have right now is Soul Calibur and maybe Super Smash Bros.
I will post this here since the other thread has swerved off topic somewhat.
I dont want to make this too short so as to not say anything but not too long as to intimidate people to not read (After finishing I guess it is too long but oh well:bgrin: ). I figure Id put my input since I used to be a hardcore CS player and have been following the fps scene daily for like the last 4 years and the fighting game scene for like the last 2 years. I’ll probably be repeating some things that people have already said, but Ill do so to further clarify my points.
After reading both threads a lot of people have been complaining about how the graphics on 2D games suck and how the average Joe wants pretty looking 3D game play, graphics, etc., but let me remind you that CS is about 6 years old, the graphics aren’t really that good, but it is the most played fps out there with some of the biggest prize money available ($300,000 prize purse at Summer CPL 2006). And not only that, Starcraft players in Korea also make the big bucks in the six figures and everyone knows that game looks like shit! So I don’t really accept that argument as an excuse why 2D games can’t become mainstream. The argument that 2D fighters are just too complicated for the beginner and that they’ll get totally raped again and again which is deterring any new gamers from playing might have some truth but this can be seen both ways. Some people might look at it as motivation to get better and some will just stop playing. I believe it will go 50/50.
I remember the first time I played CS, a friend of mine wanted to check it out with me so we went to some LAN cafe and found out the place was packed with people playing this game so we bought a couple hours and began to play. At first I didn’t even understand the concept of buying a weapon; I was like “wtf! money in an fps??” So of course my friend and I proceeded to get raped. Then after that experience, my friend never played CS again while I kept on coming back to get better (by the end of the summer I was raping everybody in the place but then I realized I was broke so I had to stop). I told my friends about CS, they tried it, some stayed, and some didn’t. Not everyone’s going to like fighting games! The best way to increase the community is by word of mouth like how I was referred by my friend, or else I probably would have never gotten into the competitive community. The second best way the community is going to grow, indirectly, would be from arcades. Places where average people can see the game, hopefully give it a try, and be hooked on it. That’s kind of far fetched but it happens. Unfortunately many arcades have the fighting games section empty while there are tons of people playing DDR and InitialD, but the best you can do is have your community get together occasionally at these arcades, preferably as much as possible, and swarm the fighting game machines so that when a passerby takes a look and sees a bunch of people playing some game, he gets interested. This is the same thing that happened to me. Luckily my university had an arcade section where I used to hang out between classes and they would always have people playing, sometimes there would be a line just to play CvS! I figured it looked like fun so I found out more about it and I ended up here on SRK. No one wants to enter into a dead or near dead community, people want to get into something that is growing, thriving, and more importantly, looks like fun (hopefully the people playing fighting games at your arcade look like theyre having fun).
Another way to get public attention would be to host tournaments in a public place. Most tournaments now are either in a ballroom, an arcade or someones house. Imagine if you can set up a tournament for example in a mall and have the finals of each game showed on a projector right smack in the middle so that everybody walking by has to watch what’s going on. That would be awesome exposure! Some of the matches from ESWC (tournament where the CS female team from True Life were at) were played outside in a park with big projectors so that any passerby could take a look. And even before that some other fps tournaments have had their finals shown in public instead of an enclosed setting.
I’m gonna give Empire Arcadia the benefit of the doubt since I don’t really know much of their history and many of the things they do but their motivation to help the FGC is definitely apparent. They showed that documentary at the New York Film Festival which, either way you look at it, is helpful. They even went to MTV to pitch jwong (unfortunately got turned down) but at least it was a shot. Now if only there were groups as dedicated as Empire Arcadia around the country cause they can’t pull everyones weight.
Game advertisements on TV do produce some sales but doesnt help the FGC much, even if they showed the craziest combos in their commercials. For example lets same some guy saw a T5 commercial and went out to buy the game, he played it for a week and then stops never even knowing a competitive community even exists! And even if he does find out about TZ.com he then thinks to himself, shit! I have to drive to somebody elses place just to play some matches, that right there will deter him from ever joining the competitive scene. Capable online play would do so much for the community people dont even realize it. Imagine have leagues and online tournaments with cash prizes!! Not only that, all the casual games you could want. Im not going to dwell on this any further since I think everyone is in agreement that this would be helpful but I believe it is necessary for the community to really grow big. Even CPL hosts their own online league called CAL. If fps games didnt have lag-free online play their community would be even smaller than the FGC. Im surprised that even this community has stuck together so long and is as big as it is now, thats because of their love of fighting games (whichever ones you play) and the determination to keep playing, travel to different tournaments around the country out of your own pockets, (All the Pro CS teams and PK players that were on MTV have their expenses paid for them! I guarantee they wouldnt even think to pay using their own money!) and keep the scene alive. But its getting harder and harder to keep people in the scene because of that isolation.
When you look at actual competitive community numbers between both of course the fps scene is much bigger with all the online leagues and tournaments that are out there but when you take a look at the numbers of people that actually go to live tournaments, the outcomes are very similar. For example, the upcoming Winter CPL (which holds the two biggest tournaments of the year, Winter CPL and Summer CPL) will have about approximately 600 competitors whereas Im not exactly sure about the turnout for Evo2k5 but it’s probably close (or at least the numbers of the previous Evos). You can compare the same number of people from tourneys like TS, FR, and ECC to some of the smaller fps tournaments, and tourneys held at local LAN centers to your local fighting game tournaments.
The only real difference is prize money at the bigger tournaments. In which the entry fee’s for fps tournaments are a bit higher, they also get money from BYOC’s that they usually hold at the same event, and the rest comes from sponsors. I bet when CPL started 8 years ago and they were holding tournaments, the community was just as small as FGC (or maybe even smaller) and the prize money was just the same. The difference between CPL and lets say SRK would be that CPL is ran as a business, where the people who work there only think about how to expand their tournaments, get more sponsors, think of ways to promote in magazines through interviews, etc… That is to say their full-time job is to grow ESports into something big and mainstream. And after working at that for 8 years Id think youd get some results. I dont think anybody on SRK has their full-time job as the growth of the community, thinking of new ways to expand and host the next big tournament or how to get exposure into the media through magazines, radio, etc… You have to do this throughout the whole year, day in day out, to get any positive results. Maybe the people who organize Evo do this but they arent doing enough (not to disrespect or anything, your efforts are much appreciated).
Sponsorships will be a big help as you can offer more prize money and therefore, ideally get more people to show up (probably even much more people from Japan). For the Pro teams and the large tournaments in the fps community, you have a ton of different possible sponsors at your disposal, mouse companies like Logitech, mouse pad companies, headset companies like Sennheiser, and then you have a variety of computer hardware companies. Many of these wouldnt work for a fighting game tournament but some that could work are drink companies like Red Bull (sponsors many extreme sports events) or Bawls (sponsors many gaming events), or Video Game magazines looking to promote their issues, or like someone said before game companies like Microsoft (even though I think theyd host any Halo tournament before Evo), Capcom, Namco, Activision, or any console game publisher who can use Evo to set up booths and advertise their latest games (not only fighting games since they know that most of the people there already own the fighting games they offer so it wouldnt be worth it for them) for all the attendees.
In order to get these companies on board you need to lure them with the numbers of people that will ultimately come and show them how professional your organization is. I mean the CPL has about 30,000+ people watching the finals match of the CS tournament live on hltv and that alone will get companies thinking theres something good here. What can the FGC community offer that shows that we are serious? First of all maybe some organization, including a news source website, not just a big message board that SRK currently is. Look at the top esports gaming sites like www.gotfrag.com, http://team.fnatic.com/, or http://www.team3d.net/. They give you current community news, the latest match results of different games, articles written by the staff dealing with many issues, latest demos so you can watch the best Pro teams in action, etc. I remember when Gotfrag was just ran by a couple of guys wanting to group together the community into one news site and now they have a team of people including reporters, graphic designers, coders, updaters, and so on. On top of all that, the sites look professional and they are easy to navigate for the beginner. SRK is just a blob of threads and if some new guy wants to see some matches of top players he needs to look through threads and hopefully he’ll find something or stumble upon combovideos.com. What Im trying to say is that it just isnt structured well. It would be good if SRK bought an ad on a popular video game magazine for the next Evo. I mean you need to be willing to risk some money at first; it isnt just going to come straight from the sponsors. How do you think Angel (CPL president) got started? He believed ESports would be big one day at a time when the community was still small but yet he pushed on to build his company taking a great risk which in the end has paid off until now. If SRK doesnt structure itself as a business other companies arent going to jump on. Theyll just see it as some people that have a hobby of playing fighting games but dont want to build anything with it.
I guess Ill end here, I probably have more stuff to say but this is enough for now. It seems as though I have written an essay for English class :bgrin: . I welcome any comments or critiques from those daring enough to read all this.
Holy christ man, paragraphs.
Until network technology gets better, online fighting games aren’t feasible.
These games require split second timing, and lag can cost you an entire round very easily.
Well, since developers won’t give us what we need to grow, we can’t just sit around and wait for it to happen. I agree with alot of the issues above, and hopefully we can figure something out to make this website 10x better.
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People writing articles, posting tutorials, BitTorrent actually being used for something, etc. ALL THESE THINGS COULD MAKE HUGE DIFFERENCES. Imagine a scrub coming to this website for the first time and seeing the front page. They don’t know the forums is the only reason to come here, they don’t know where to even BEGIN. We need to find a way to fix that.
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Making premium membership worth something. Good god, please do something about this. I get a magical forum that nobody else can see, I can’t see ads and I get a bigger avatar… but what the hell is that worth? I know once it’s over, I won’t be getting it again, especially when it’s now MORE money than the last time, and there’s nothing better! I want something more from it. I want exclusive content, just like all other websites that have that kind of idea.
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Out with the old, in with the new. Do we want the community to stay any more divided than it already is? We need to focus on ALL 2D fighters here. We need to stop advertising old games and start focusing on the fresh blood. There are new 2D fighters coming out, and we need to really support them! Instead of alienating those GGXX Slash players, or Hotoku no Ken players, we should be trying to get MORE people into it! This is the only way we’ll ever keep growing, guys. Shoryuken needs to stand as the CENTER of the community, not one end of it.
Honestly, this is the only way I can see fighting games as making a huge revival. We CAN make it bigger, but we need to think about the community’s central point, and that’s no longer the arcades, but here on this website / other websites.
I don’t think that necessarily has to involve shunning the old games though.
I don’t think we need to shun them as much as talk about the newer titles more. Create hype around them and whatnot. I guess the biggest problem being that we need said games to come out for PS2 first. =/
Posting articles on simple stuff like execution or what not, which i know might have been written on threads before but some new guy isn’t going to find it. Or maybe some top player analyzing one of his matches and writting some commentary on it would be cool.
Gotfrag also does Prime membership which gives you extra articles, private servers to play on and private hltv servers to watch tournaments, streaming videos, private forums, and most important just helping out the site and the community in general.
Everyone in the entire fighting game community is so hellbent on hanging onto predisposed opinions of games and never giving them a second look after initially putting them aside.
Make these games more accessible to new players. IMO these games are very difficult. I can’t count how many times ive taken out people with just cammy’s bullshit in cvs2 and trying to explain why she is so good and ways to stop her. Then if I show them RC’ing or 3s Chuns and Yuns bullshit or even Sent+capcom they just get turned off and get disgusted. If they walk away and never touch the games again i won’t call them scrubs/noobs or anything because I can see where they are coming from. In the SF2 era the games were moderately easy to pic up and play. Everyone was new to the game, there wasn’t a previous base from which players could utterly destroy the new players, like we have today. We need a new SF2 where it just attracts and draws in people like the original, i don’t see that happening again.