I stopped playing fighting games some time in 2012 although I’ve been loosely following tournaments and the pro scene in general the whole time. I’m coming back a bit because I got into Tekken 7 and wanted to finish some arcade sticks I’ve been working on for a long time. Coming back now I got this major vibe that the community died a long time ago and is just the niche hardcores left. Seems like most of the tech innovation stopped 4 years ago, new designs, new parts, etc. I don’t see many noobs around, don’t see a lot of activity in general honestly.
I looked up trends to see if this was just a feeling or actually truthful, here is the google trends for SRK since 2004.
You can probably directly chart all of that to major events in the fighting game industry and the tides of social media. I see the SRK internal stats when updating aspects of Vanilla, and you can pretty easily see the tides surrounding game releases, Evo, etc.
Ultra got robbed by the absolute travesty that is 5.
Ultra could have had 4 more years, and it would have been great to watch, as well as play.
The meta got shafted by a piece of shit “sequel” that needed a few more years, incubating in Crapcom’s anus, to refine itself into a more polished turd, before being flushed down the shitter for something better… like a stained, empty bowl, or Capcom acquiring the licensing rights to poop out a Time Killers remake.
Ultra 4 is a better Street Fighter 5 than SF5 will ever be.
Maybe you are forgetting how bad ultra was when it launched. The hitboxes on the SFxT copy/paste characters were busted, netcode was fucked up on the PS3 and completely broken on PC for an absurd amount of time. PS4 version had severe performance issues IIRC when that came out as well.
The new ‘features’ were wack as well imo. Delayed wakeup was implemented in a really counter-intuitive way. Press a button on most knockdowns to get up faster, press a button on hard knockdowns to get up… slower? Red focus was a dud.
Maybe it ended up being better overall than AE/2012, but it took capcom a long time to fix major issues and get it there, and SF4 in general was really stale by that point.
That was @ the guy above my post, but yeah I think much of the attention SF4 had garnered from the mainstream was already gone by that point, outside of maybe tuning into evo when it’s on the front page of twitch.
Man that’s depressing. I came back to finish some arcade sticks I have had half-built for years, not even sure if it’s worth finishing them at this point. Probably will just for the hell of it.
Too be fair, SRK has really only been a hub for modern capcom games, and SF5 + (to a much larger degree) MVCI have been flops. SFxT before that not well received by players either.
Even if they are trafficked way less than SSF4 era SRK, dustloop/tekkenzaibatsu/testyourmight/etc are still around for other games and sub-genres. A lot of folks have moved to places like discord and reddit for fighting game stuff as well. If you find the right places for the games you’re playing, I don’t think you’ll have a shortage of people to play/discuss them with, albeit they will be smaller communities. There were even a decent amount of people on fightcade for ST, 3S, old KoF, etc. on fightcade last I checked.
I’m not sure fighting games are going to get back into the mainstream limelight anytime soon thou, but perhaps dragonball figherz has a chance.
I agree with the others here that what was once a novel (if very niche) genre has since deteriorated into what it is now. Some of the games arent as much fun as others that came before and I feel like many studios dont really have a clear direction of where to take the genre next that can appeal to both crowds without resulting in terrible ideas like Xfactor ,or Tekken’s “supers”, whatever the hell SCV’s deal was, the complete dissection of defense tech in most fighting games,etc. And also, for certain local and online scenes, newcomers arent exactly always the most welcomed. at least they may feel that way since they might not have anyone they measure up to very well. But yeah, thats kind of what happened.
One part of the puzzle is the dumb shit James Chen would say that “if you ever played an FG, you are FGC”. There is not a single cultural group ever fucking studied that has such a low barrier of membership. That dumb shit made it so that any random place was suddenly FGC if people wanked to KoF doujins.
The rest is some other wacky decision making in the SF4 years.