Or they don’t like the character that they don’t have to pick.
Yeah I’m not playing a game when I’ll have to see a real life rapist in the character select screen
Comment on Riot Games lays off roughly 80 employees from 2XKO team
Laser@feddit.org 1 day ago
While I do like the genre, fighting games are a niche nowadays, and you’re always going up against Street Fighter, Tekken or Smash. I don’t know what Riot expected. It has similar vibes to the Saudis investing millions into a single marketing event for CotW.
Even Mortal Kombat 1, while it was initially a commercial success, is basically no longer supported as far as I know. And that game isn’t old either.
The visible audience (Twitter) is very picky and vocal; they’ll tell you they want thing X, they get thing X, they’ll tell you it’s bad because Y. There is very little nuance it seems sometimes.
Remember when everyone complained there were no defensive options and everything was getting too easy? Them CotW came and nobody plays it because the menu sucks. Or they don’t like the character that they don’t have to pick.
I at least have a legitimate reason not to play 2XKO (kernel level anti cheat that won’t work on Linux), but you don’t see me complaining about that.
Anyhow, if you want to make a game that sells big numbers, don’t make it a fighting game, because your audience will be comparably small and hate you.
Feyd@programming.dev 1 day ago
jacksilver@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
What?
Are there fighting games with real people?
Kolanaki@pawb.social 5 hours ago
Def Jam New York is literally nothing but real world rappers.
The Kung-Fu Master Jackie Chan has Jackie Chan.
Samurai Showdown features a couple historical characters.
And if you wanna count them, every fight night, every UFC game, and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! although, I figure you were asking about Street Fighter/MK/Tekken type games.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
That’s fair, I guess I was focused more on the bigger players in fighting games which usually focus on fictional worlds/fighters.
Feyd@programming.dev 22 hours ago
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves has Cristiano Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci in it. Having a goofy soccer character as a character is out of place in that game, I don’t want real people in fighting games at all, and to top it off, Rinaldo is a piece of shit anyway.
Laser@feddit.org 17 hours ago
Wacky characters aren’t really out of place for Fatal Fury, or fighting games in general. Duck King for example never was too serious either, and Mai is a joke / comic relief character as well. In fact I’d say fighting games weren’t 100% serious since World Warrior.
Regarding Ronaldo, I agree with the point, though I think the fact that he is in the game is the Saudis, and SNK managed to get a pretty good fighting game character designed around that. The fact that they had to include him specifically and not generic soccer dude shows how out of touch the Saudis are with the audience. But I guess they don’t have a problem with rapists in the first place.
I won’t stand any slander against Ganacci though, he seemed really happy to be included in the game, played it and even visited tournaments.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Not to try to dissuade you from your stance, because as an American who could not be more divorced from knowing anything about soccer, I only learned about Ronaldo when he was announced as a character for Fatal Fury; but a guy who can do mixups with a soccer ball is among the more interesting character designs in that game. Shame who it had to be attached to, but it wasn’t nothing.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
That’s really weird
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Except for Fatal Fury, which is a revival of a series that people haven’t heard of in decades, all of those games are tremendously successful and could not be counted as niche anymore. MK1 did poorly by Mortal Kombat standards, which still made it the eighth best-selling game of 2023. DBFZ sold over 10 million copies. The genre is not the problem; not even being a tag fighter is the problem. This game just didn’t take off, and free-to-play games need volume.
Laser@feddit.org 1 day ago
But doesn’t it speak volumes about the genre of the eighth best selling game of 2023 can’t support three years of service (as in meaningful content updates)?
While there weren’t any Fatal Fury entries, the characters did have presence over the years via King of Fighters, and Mai and Terry were even in SF6.
SF6, arguably the biggest game in the genre, is currently in 60th place in the steam 24 hour charts. You might argue consoles have a higher share for the genre than games you find on steam, but still, that’s not totally mainstream.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Oh, they could have, but this is NetherRealm Studios. This is the first time they went 4 years between fighting games. Ordinarily, they’re on a two-year cadence, and each game sells multiple millions of copies. Which do you think makes more money? Selling a game at $60-$70, or selling DLC to people who already bought an old game? The experiment they tried this past game was the big cinematic expansion, because it was successful for MK11, but they were going to do a series of episodes for MK1 that basically meant the story was never-ending; and they replaced the Krypt mode with Invasions, which was also intended to be never-ending. Neither of those things took off, and this big cinematic expansion also cost $50. Their average customer was not thrilled about Kameos, so it makes far more sense for them to just put out the next Injustice game, as long as their parent company can keep from collapsing long enough that DC superheroes are still intellectual property that this studio is allowed to use.
King of Fighters games are not multimillion sellers. People being vaguely aware of Mai and Terry does a bit of help, but brand recognition takes longer than that. Fatal Fury didn’t get enough production value out of its development budget to do anything like SF6’s world tour mode, or NRS’s story modes, that would bring in the less sweaty players. Instead, it just got Saudi money thrown into marketing a game that was never going to make that money back.
No, in fact, that’s an old way of thinking. Since the pandemic, there have been a few ways where we’ve been able to measure the share of players on each platform in certain fighting games, and PC is the biggest one every time; I’m sure there are outliers, but PC is the largest platform whether we’re talking about fighting games or not. 60th place on Steam’s charts is phenomenal and not at all niche! There are so many games on Steam being played by about 140M people per month. Only being beaten by 59 of them is incredibly successful.
_Nico198X_@europe.pub 14 hours ago
KoF is pretty big everywhere but NA/Eur. last one did very well.