Interesting stuff about Street Fighter 4

[Sullla]

Played_Out said:
Simplifying fighting games is a bad idea. It's their complexity that makes them fun. I used to think Street Fighter 2 was awesome back in the day, but playing it now shows how far fighters have moved on. Button-mashing FTL.

Congratulations! You have accurately summed up why fighting games have fallen from the most popular genre of the early 90s, into servicing a tiny niche audience of "hardcore" devotees. I'm sure that Sega is extremely happy with these kind of sales:

1	Virtua Fighter 2		1.93m	Sega
2	Virtua Fighter 4		1.71m	Sega
3	Virtua Fighter		1.07m	Sega
4	Virtua Fighter 5		0.45m	Sega

You know, since the latest Virtua Fighter has struggled to sell half of what the series used to do on the SATURN, of all platforms. Or look at the declining sales of Tekken:

1	Tekken 3		6.91m	Namco
2	Tekken 2		5.45m	Namco
3	Tekken Tag Tournament		3.94m	Namco
4	Tekken 4		3.31m	Namco
5	Tekken		3.18m	Namco
6	Streets of Rage		2.60m	Sega
7	Tekken 5		1.32m	Namco

(Ignore Streets of Rage, I have no clue what it's doing in there.) Each of the last 3 games has sold less than its predecessor (Tekken Tag, Tekken 4, Tekken 5) and the most recent game barely cracked a million. That's a quarter of the sales when the series was at its height on the Playstation. This franchise is a shadow of its former self.

Piling on layers of additional complexity has never been the way to make games more fun. Sure, that's not to say every game should be a simplistic button masher, but there's a point of diminishing returns beyond which you start losing more than you gain. I don't think there's any doubt that the fighting genre as a whole has been servicing its most devoted fans - and leaving the vast bulk of everyone else behind. Sooner or later, developers are going to have to broaden their appeal, especially as the graphical demands for these games make them more and more expensive (and, recently, unprofitable).

On topic, I loved the original Street Fighter II, and have roundly hated its more recent incarnations (most of which were so complicated, I didn't even know where to begin). Now I'm actually interested in their upcoming game again. Capcom seems to be pretty on the ball lately.