The Judge's Letter

[steamwolf]

And SFIV is the best selling fighting game right now! And yet its only average in sales! Now try to imagine what kind of numbers KoF, Blazblue, etc hold. How much they matter on the whole, compared to all this. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the problem: people are too busy living in a bubble, or too busy pointing fingers and whining to notice the overall, frightening, truth: Fighting games are still on the verge of death. This is a concept many may be hard-pressed to believe but I go by actual results. Check vgchartz.com sometime and look up the sales figures on fighting games.

I strongly disagree with this, I feel that fighting games are back in force of popularity not because of sales figures but because of how many people are playing them nowadays, new and upcoming games, the hype and excitement around them and how many people are interested in learning them.

You can strongly disagree, but the sales figures show how many people are playing. Its not like there are ten million people playing with free copies or anything here. I can show you actual sales data to show this, and while you wanna think its strong sad to say its not. People can't play unless they buy the games, and if people aren't buying the games then that shows how many people are actually playing. It may seem like a lot, but compare it to whats actually working and you'll see the genre is still very much on the brink of fading away. It is not as bad as it was, but by no means has SFIV saved things forever. Don't confuse hype with reality here. And you must remember by a company's standards, SALES are what will determine if they keep making fighting games and Capcom mostly does not want to continue this. Why is that? Do you think they have a hatred for it? No, it is because of sales. This is the issue we are faced with here man its not a fantasy or opinion. It is fact.

[jinxhand]

Man it's like this:

Fighting games are the new "popular hobby", especially given the fact that most of the games released since SF4 (including SF4) are easy accessible games that have been dumbed down for the newer generation of fighters... It's not on the verge of death, but it's more of a spike per sé, where there's a quick boost in sales and hype, but overtime, that spike is gonna drop on the other side, and make way for the "new trendy gaming genre"... It's nowhere near what it was back in the "golden era" where Capcom and SNK and a plethora of other gaming companies spewed out fighters for saturn, ps1, ps2, dc, n64, xbox and even gamecube... Now, only a few games really come out, and those that give much hype (heavy marketing = popularity), money, and has a huge amount of support for the online community get mad play and the others, well it kinda depends on the FG community that supports that particular game... That's why so many people get on the SF4/Tekken train and not the KoF/VF train... There have been people who make excuses saying "I don't play 2d fighters", but still get on SF4, or they say things like "I always loved KoF/VF over SF/Tekken, blah blah blah", but barely get on KoF or VF...

[cHuCo_]

Well I see some good points here, but reality is that the fps comunity is not really that popular in a global scale. I see it only popular in the US and Europe really. Mainly because not every single person in the planet has the luxury to own a 360/ps3. I myself always considerd the fighting game industry as futbol(soccer), its the more playd sport around the globe, but in US? you got others sports overshadowing it like baseball, basketball, NFL, ect. I dont even worry about kof that much since i really dont see it dying in my area any time soon cuz i live in a SoCal bordertown(not SD) and visit Mexico quite often and the arcade scene there is pretty popular and also there are kof cabinets all over town in every corner sadly most of them run the plus version but that still encourages people from 8-year-old to teens to go to the arcades and play more competative in the vanilla version and come accross playing newer kofs against the seasoned 30-year-old veterans that play kof since 95-96 probably.