A friend of mine living in China told me that all they play over there is KOF. I’m not sure which game, though.
Ahahaha
SF4 sold about 3 million copies.
Which, although much less than SF2 in the golden era, is pretty good.
Out of that 3 million, probably at least 1/3 of those are Johnny Casual Gamers who picked it up because it was the thing at the time and stopped played after about a month once the next thing at the time came along. So we’ll say maybe 2 million at the most actually spent some time really PLAYING SF4.
There are probably close to 2 million people in China ALONE who play KOF. Not counting Mexico, Central America, South America, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Pakistan…
*EDIT: After checking vgchartz, it seems that Super SF4 is going to end up with about 400k worldwide sales for the first week. Capcom only shipped about 1 million copies to begin with.
MOST PLAYED GAME EVAR M I RITE???
3 million copies doesn’t make sf4 the most played game in the world either. a sold copy doesn’t mean an active player, and you can’t make any comparison to arcade based games.
however pointing out that kof is not a single game is a good point, and if you wanna get technical, theres a bunch of hacked copies out there too.
MK vs DC sold about 2 million copies. Is there ANYONE still playing that?
nr 1 is either kof or tekken. closely followed by sf.
tekken is worldwide.
same for kof cept its not that played that much in europe and the US.
sf on the other hand is largly played by the US, and everywhere in the world but its not as popular as it is in the US.
Easy, it’s KOF.
Considering the fact that China has over 1,3 billion citizens, you can easily say that 10 million of them play KOF.
Add:
A big chunk off the rest of Asia (including India and Pakistan)
All of Central/ South America
Middle east (Kuwait, UAE etc.)
Mostly southern parts of Europe (not much though)
its gotta be kof98 hands down IMO. Judging by the amount of people that play it on ggpo, the game is HUGE. kof98 is the only game on ggpo to have more than 1 room, it actually has 3 fucking room with over 150+ playing per night and on a hot night, its 250+.
Truth be told, it was hard to fathom how big KOF was but it wasn’t until GGPO that I understood. These #'s for kof98 on ggpo are constant, for years by the way. The game is EXTREMELY popular.
Pretty much in every way, KOF is better than SF but for some reason, the game never really took off here. If you compare the 2 games, SF is actually a babies game.
I think nobody that ever spent some serious time with both would even try to argue the fact that KOF has more layers for mindgames, which end up making the skill ceiling higher
I don’t play KOF seriously and I know this
3rd strike.
as someone who lives and participates on the fighting game comunity here in central america, i need to say that kof is not popular here, not in guatemala, not in honduras, not in nicaragua, not in el salvador and not in costa rica (i dont know about) so you can stop counting us on the kof wagon, yes there are people who likes to play it, but is not near as popular as GG, BB, mvc2, tekken, mb, 3s or ssf4 are
he asked the more played 
lol just to be clear kof98 is one of my favorite games but this is a fucking moronic statement. kof and sf test different skill sets but you cant say one has a quantifiably higher skill ceiling than the other
Just like your SF4 sold x copies statement?
Being a Brazilian myself, I second the statement above.
Sucks that most of our fellow Brazilian buddies are such scrubs, right?
~
If we only take into account the arcades, Tekken 6 is the most played fighting game right now.
However, demographically, things are mostly like that:
East: Tekken (Japan, China, and mostly South Korea)
West: SF
South America / Hispanic Countries: KoF
I probably can’t give you convincing reasoning, but to use a term your namesake would love, but that makes me sick: “yomi layers” are possible to visualize and make objective, a game with more options, possible situations brought forward by its system mechanics and the branches they open up will usually have a higher attainable skill ceiling
I am simply talking about potential skill ceiling, not “which takes more skill”, as that’s highly subjective and very personal (different people find different aspects of games difficult)
hahahahahahahaha
The ‘simpler’ a game is, the harder it is to be special at it.
you think 10 million people play kof in china lol
Often for the wrong reasons, though - See professional Rock Paper Scissor tournaments and how irregular their results can be (Yes, there are professional RPS tournaments and players, and even books on RPS player psychology yjdk)
Yeah, I do know. Obviously there is a certain threshold before it gets too simple to differentiate true skill.
Then couldn’t it conversely be said that deeper games are even harder to “be special” at? You’ll have all the requirements of a simple one and possibly more