ya lol. 90% of the online players choose ryu / ken / akuma. funny thing is I played so many of them that I know most of their tactics and not many players can beat me with one of the 3 hadoken-spam characters.

I use Blanka most of the time and I'm working on Chun-Li and Cammy right now.

for one its an old series.. if you compare VF/ tekken sales of the early versions of those games to the more recent ones you'll see a decline too.. Its natural.. I think the series has sold pretty well and should have long long legs.

It's still the beggining I'm sure people will switch around characters. I'm surprised not that many people take Sagat or Zangief those two characters are broken. My friend was playing Akuma and is switching over to Gouken.

That's what happens when you release game thet requires $50-150 arcade sticks to play comfortably.

^It's not that bad using a normal controller unless you're good enough to focus dash cancel your moves. Dashing is so hard on the d-pad and even than I don't think it's impossible. Just pop on training mode shoryu- dash cancel shoryu dash cancel shoryu dash cancel, although I could see it take me months before I can even start using it in an actual match.

I'm still having a blast with SFIV. I play it on both the 360 and PS3. It plays better on 360. Why? Because PS3 owners that haven't installed the game are annoying. The match start up time on PS3 is pain. Most people on-line do pick Ken in my experience but that's fine because I can beat them 90% of the time. I use Gouken, Cammy, and I'm starting to use Guile a lot. Ryu is one of my favorite characters but I've made it a point not use him. I'm tired of people not trying to learn new characters.

In my experience, maybe it's different from you all. The best on-line players pick less popular characters. Part of it is their skill level and the other part is not knowing their tactics in and out like I do Ken players. I've run into a excellent Rose player, a couple of good El Fuerte's, and the biggest shocker was a guy that actually use Seth. Unlike the Boss version, the playable version of Seth is quite weak. He has the less hit points in the game and he has the lowest stun points. So he takes ton of damage and he is easy to dizzy. To top it all of he hits for low damage.

I don't see a ton of Akuma players, one of my best friends is an Akuma player. He is very good, he can actually land the Raging Demon. Of course he doesn't telegraph it like Akuma scrubs. As for Ryu, I may try to learn him after all because I seem him less than Akuma. Ken and Sagat seem to be who I run into all the time.

Looking at opening week in Europe and comparing figures in the long run it will most likely outsell Soul Calibur IV.

SCIV had a insane amount of marketing around it and had Starwars characters. SFIV is all about SF fanbase and doesn't have any special characters that they had to pay off to put in the game.

So yeah, SFIV sales are doing really good.

Well Street Fighter IV is obviously an online heavy game, so I tried to compare it with another online heavy game and another fighting game. I'm using mygamercard.net for this comparison (userbase: 2.783.442):

                            Owners on Mygamercard      Sales on VGChartz       Multiplier

Left 4 Dead             502.361                                  1.839.652                      3.66

Soul Calibur IV        295.183                                   1.157.847                     3.92

Street Fighter IV      194.790                                     560.504                     2.88

__________________________________________________________________________

So it could (could) be undertracked by ~50k. (Assumed it will sell 40k this week and a 3.5 multiplier)

Anyways the numbers aren't that off and I do think it won't have a hard time to outsell Soul Calibur IV.

EDIT: LOL I should have mentioned that I'm talking about 360 sales

I'm just not understanding how anyone could be disappointed with the sales. Capcom has always over shipped their products in the past and retailers have bought the copies.  Retailers who want to buy more then what will sell in the first few weeks are at fault unless they know the game is gonna sell well and want to stock pile.

The only game that has a chance of outselling this game is Tekken which is due out this holiday season supposedly. Tekken is probably going to sell at least 3-4 million copies between both platforms if not more looking at past sales.

Are we really sure Tekken will sell that well ?

I'd say they did very poor decision of waiting till september as SF IV will probably steal a lot of possible userbase from them.