Fighting Games ARE Popular, But They Aren’t THAT Popular.

In your previous article, Jonathan, you asked a question that many online fighting game gurus have wondered for years: “Why AREN’T Fighting Games Popular?” I must admit that I spent much of my time at work, at the dinner table, and in my bed pondering the answer to this question. I watched fighting game tournaments online, conducted research, experimented with all types of games in training mode, and even went to a local tournament myself to truly understand why these games fail to reach the widest audience possible. I searched high and low for the answer to this question that has stumped many a gamer.

During my search for answers, as if Fate was blessing me, the podcast Triple K.O. hosted a discussion regarding which fighting game franchises should return to the limelight. Near the end of that podcast, Youtuber and Fighting Game Enthusiast Maximilian Dood says, “I want a fighting game that actually is-I just want to play online and that is completely free. […] The biggest challenge that fighting games have, is getting people to step in the door and to invest. That is the biggest, toughest part. People don’t want to spend sixty bucks to get their ass beat.”

Are you and Max right? Are fighting games truly an unpopular genre due to their intimidating nature? Are games like League of Legends and Fortnite truly the future of the industry?

After more research, deep thinking, and many drafts of this very letter; finally I sit writing what I have learned for all to read so that they to may know the truth. What is the truth? The truth that has been hidden for so long behind the barrier of wisdom? The truth that has alluded the most skilled and talented gamers for decades? The truth is this:

You guys are sort of wrong, fighting games are actually pretty popular.

But you are both also right, fighting games aren’t that popular.

Now before you roast me, let me remind you that I’m not against you Jonathan. In this game of life, my dear friend, I am your assist button. Maximilian is one of the wisest fighting game gurus online, having deep roots with players, developers, and the fighting game culture as a whole. I would normally never defy him or his advanced knowledge. So allow me to explain myself before I make any more bold claims.

I Wish That I Was Cool…like Sub Zero

Popularity is a bizarre thing to define, especially in relation to video games and even more so when discussing fighting games. I think to better understand how and why that is, we need to briefly look outside of those realms. So let’s use movies as our example. When discussing film, we would consider a popular movie to be something that a vast amount of people have seen, or at the very least, something that people can recognize. How many times have you heard the phrase “I’m gonna make em’ an offer they can’t refuse.” Or how about “You should have gone for the head.” These quotes, from The Godfather and Avengers: Infinity War respectively, are still recognizable quotes. Despite these films being released years ago (the Godfather is 50 years old, just so we’re clear) people still know where these iconic lines hail from. Beyond that, these films were wildly successful in terms of box office performance, indicating that many people across the globe went out to watch these films on the big screen.

In the realm of fighting games, we can look first at the cultural impact these games have had on the world around them. For example, thanks to Youtuber AFX, we can see just how many films and tv series make references to these iconic characters.

As we dip our toes into the Netherealm, we would find that Mortal Kombat possibly stands on top of the heap in terms of cultural impact and recognition. Not only are their numerous references made across the world of tv and film, but the game actually caused a tangible change in the real world. Due to the game’s popularity and excessive violence with its iconic fatalities (along with other violent games growing an audience), games had to be rated by an outside party to decide which audiences would be suitable to play them. This is the birth of the ESRB, the standard for rating games. How many game franchises can say they actually changed the course of the industry?

“If these games are so iconic, then how come they don’t sell well?”

That’s just it. They do sell.

They sell very well.

Mortal Kombat 11, the most recent iteration of the franchise at the time of this writing, has sold over 12 million kopies (I had to) worldwide making it the highest selling game in the franchise.

“Yeah, but that’s just Mortal Kombat.”

Oh?

How about:

Street Fighter V? — 6 million (only available on PS4 and PC)

Guilty Gear: Strive? — only 500,000…a number from its launch in July of last year. The game has most assuredly grown towards reaching that million copies threshold so many publishers dream about and it’s an anime fighter that only a few years ago would be considered obscure.

This is where the conversation about a fighting game’s popularity can get a bit muddy. It’s clear that these games reach an enormous amount of people and these sales figures are far from any indie darling’s numbers. So if they’re selling so well…why does it feel like nobody is playing them? How come when I hop online in my chosen fighting game, it can take me forever to find a match? Where is everybody?

I’m Only Here For the Super Moves

Let me take you back to about 2012, Jonathan. Me and my older brother walk into a Gamestop. On the PS3 shelves we see Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition for a price that must have been appealing to my deal hunting brother. We buy the game, head home and boot it up. For the rest of the night, we played through story mode. For the rest of the week, we played through the ladders in Tag Kombat. We were terrible, but is was so much fun to fight to reach Shao Kahn and have him decimate us in the most unfair and brutal ways possible. And finally for the rest of the month, my brother…would be playing Far Cry 3.

While I would occasionally hop onto Mortal Kombat and try my best to do cool kombos (that’s what they are called in that game, Jon, I can’t help it), my brother would quit the game cold turkey and resume his FarCry 3 100% completion play through. This would be a pattern that would repeat with other games. Injustice, Mortal Kombat X, even Smash Bros. My brother would play them for about a week and than move onto a different game that he believed just had more to offer. Some games, like Street Fighter 4, he wouldn’t even bother with.

While I’m sure you would like to tell me that this is just an example of my brother being a filthy causal (and you aren’t wrong), speaking purely from anecdotal evidence, this is pretty standard. Many of our mutual friends have played our favorite fighting games with us Jon, everything from Smash Bros to Dragonball Fighterz. In fact, our high school friend group bonded over late nights of Injustice: Gods Among Us. Yet, you and me remain the only two members of that group who play fighting games…at all.

Sometimes even when the game is free, the characters are well known and loved by the owner of the game, and the player has a friend group who is also willing to play with them online; they still just won’t stick around to see what the game has to offer. I’m of course talking about my friend and roommate, who had a good two week long streak of playing Dragonball Fighterz via Game Pass with his friends…until they just stopped. Why did they stop, though? Was it because things were getting heated? Was the game just too hard? Were they not really enjoying it? Was the online just too horrible to bare?

Nope. They stopped just cause they wanted to play something else. My roommate would return to his old apocalyptic stomping grounds in Fallout 4, one his favorite games, and his friends would join him for some cooperative chaos in other games. When it wasn’t Fallout 4 though, it was (quite ironically for this article) League of Legends. Even in my local arcade where most of my fighting game tournaments take up the entire left side of the venue with the gameplay being streamed directly onto a massive projector on the wall, most casual customers will hop onto the classic Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat 4 arcade cabinets and mash buttons before they pay any attention to the fights on the big screen.

These fighting games get played for about two weeks to a month, the story gets beaten, a few matches with friends happen offline or online, and…that’s it. Onto the next one. This is the casual life cycle of most fighting games even today with robust online matchmaking making it easier to play with your friends. Your average gamer wants to simply hop on, mash some buttons, see a super move, and beat the story mode or arcade mode. This ends up leaving the players who want to truly get good and keep playing their favorite fighter struggling to find players at their skill level to compete with.

This is the struggle for people who love these games like you, me and Maximilian and also the question you were pondering in your article; how do we get people to stick around and realize that fighting games are great and that they too can have more fun with them then they realize? How do we hook people the same way that other games have done?

At the risk of being totally and utterly wrong, I’ll speculate anyway. Perhaps we will discover the answer to this problem in the heart of battle.

That’s Right, You Are FREE…to play.

While the title would suggest that I completely disagree with Maximilian’s statement, I actually think he has a point about going free to play. Like it or not, free to play games make it easier for players to jump into a game with very little perceived risk. If you don’t like a game, you don’t have to feel like you wasted your money or much of your time and simply uninstall. I don’t think EVERY fighting game should go free to play, but I certainly thinking trying something like this could certainly get people to come “through the door” as Max puts it. After all, if it wasn’t for the Dragonball Fighterz being available on Xbox’s Game Pass, my friend may not even have given it a second thought. Brawlhalla, Killer Instinct, and even Street Fighter V would flirt with the concept of free to play in varying ways, with Brawlhalla finding massive appeal and success because of the model.

However, being free to play is only a portion of the battle. As I mentioned earlier, getting people to invest in fighting games might not be the real issue. So even if our game is free, that doesn’t mean it will live on forever. Many free to play AAA titles have tried and failed to be the next hot game on the market, so let’s not go believing that just cause there isn’t a price tag associated with the game that it will translate to overwhelming success. We gotta give people a reason to come and play these games.

How do we do that? Easy. We give them…a real video game.

Putting the Game Back in Fighting Games

One of the most common answers I get from people when I ask them why they don’t try fighting games, is that they are too difficult. People feel intimated by having to learn combos, special move inputs, and other assorted things fighting games come with. In fact, my roommate who tried DBFZ and loves himself some League said much the same when I asked him about it. This ties back into Max; earlier quote about not wanting to pay sixty dollars to get beaten up by someone online. But is difficulty really the barrier here? Personally, I don’t buy it. Why? Because gamers have demonstrated time and time again that they will purchase a good game, even if it promises to do just that…beat their ass.

In February of this year, about 12 million gamers purchased the overwhelmingly anticipated game by FromSoftware, Elden Ring. Elden Ring, much like its older siblings of the Dark Souls and Sekiro games, is a very very challenging game. The game can be brutal, putting your character up against giant bears, dragons, and eldritch abominations from the depths of hell. The game can be so difficult that many a video game reviewer will note how they desperately want an easy mode to be available for those who just want to experience the story and world of the game…with the developers responding with “no.”

So if this game is so hard…why would people play it? Why would someone go through the struggle of learning an enemy’s attack patterns, weaknesses, and what certain item, spell, and stat builds do in the world of Elden Ring? Because, Elden Ring has mountains upon mountains of content. Side quests, hidden paths, bosses, and so much more are in storer you when you purchase your copy of the game. Yes, difficulty will certainly be there but the amount of fun you can have just running around discovering things while conquering those tough challenges will be well worth the investment. In short, Elden Ring has content that outweighs the challenge factor that intimidates people. This is what fighting games are missing.

Don’t get me wrong. A fighting game story mode can be great fun and I have thoroughly enjoyed Mortal Kombat’s efforts in that area. However, once the story wraps…what else can a player do? Arcade modes for different endings, maybe a survival mode? Sure. Anything else? Nothing that’s gonna hook our casual gamer. What these games really need is some truly engaging content. The kind that makes players want to just keep playing the game by themselves and with others.

Thankfully, there just so happens to be a game that does this perfectly, and it might not even be a fighting game.

The Ultimate Package

Smash Ultimate is NOT fighting game. Why? Simple. You aren’t meant to play Smash Bros. Competitively. How do I know? Because you can:

Play against up to 7 other players in a roster of over 80 characters spanning from across the video game industry and battle on over 100 unique stages while utilizing powerful and wacky items to get the edge on your foes. Play in the Smashdown or Squad Strike modes that change the way you select characters. Play the Spirits mode and play through a unique single player experience where you collect icons and abilities from Nintendo’s long history. Try the all new Classic Mode, tailor made to each character. Home run Smash, Stage builder, Challenges, etc.

Why would they include all these fun, interesting features that don’t have to rely so heavily on playing the game like your life is on the line? Fighting games are meant to have fighting and thats it. They aren’t meant to be fun! They are meant to be for the truly hardcore gamers who wanna show everybody that they are the true champions and better than everybody else!

While I’m clearly exaggerating here, this is how some casual gamers feel about fighting games. When there aren’t any co-operative modes to enjoy with friends, no cool items or fun customization options to earn, no weird wacky modes to make the game feel more casual friendly, it begins to appear like these games really are just for the “hardcore” gamers who just want to “get good” instead of having fun which is the primary goal of most gamers.

Let’s be clear here: Super Smash Bros. IS a fighting game series. The biggest slight of hand Mashiro Sakurai and his team ever pulled on the Fighting Game Community, was convincing the population the Super Smash Bros. series is a simple action-party game. While most other fighting games focus on making sure that the singular competitive mode functions as fluidly as possible, Smash split its focus on making sure that the game could find a perfect divide between “random party chaos” and the competitive smash experience. How did that approach go? Well, despite releasing on only ONE console, never going on sale below $30, and NOT having rollback netcode…the game has sold 27 million copies, has gone on to win a plethora of awards including Fighting Game of the Year in 2019 even up against Mortal Kombat 11 and Samurai Showdown, and to this day has one of the most massive audiences both causal and competitive…just playing the game.

My point here isn’t to say that Smash Ultimate is the greatest fighting game ever made, my point is to illustrate just how successful a fighting game can be both financially and socially when the developers choose to focus on making these games feel more like a worthwhile package. It’s clear that gamers love a good fighting game, even if they don’t know how to throw a fireball. The appeal is there and the sales numbers demonstrate the real popularity of fighting games. Yet, the real issue is providing people with experiences that go beyond online matchmaking, training, and arcade. Let players play online WITH friends instead of against them, offer them bizarre combat options that change battles into a chaotic party of attacks, supers, and randomness, and let players customize more than fighter tags and icons.

Simply put…give players more kontent (had to sneak one last one in there).

Your friend, your rival

-Blake