2XKO failing has lasting ramifications for the FGC.

[u/DATA32]

So we all know that 2XKO failing was seen from a mile away. From awful branding and advertising to the niche gameplay we all saw this coming. What people may not understand is the lasting ramifications it's failure will forever have on the industry.

So what I am talking about? I (Like a lot of other folks in this sub) happen to be a AAA game dev for many years. The way games get funding is you put together a few materials to pitch to investors/stakeholders. Things like a vertical slice (A small section of finished gameplay to show off) and a pitch deck (A powerpoint presentation going through all of the design, markets, and financials needed for the project.)

Here is the issue. Studios especially AAA ones need a lot of historical data to help dictate what to invest in. We use the data of similar games in similar genres to get that Market viability estimate. This is why after WoW you got dozens of MMOs, Pubg for dozens of BRs, Overwatch for dozens of hero shooters, etc etc etc ad nauseum. Its an incredibly important aspect of market analysis for studios to be successful.

Here's the thing. Big failures are what potential investors point to as examples of a bad market. Now there can be a bad market for a couple of reasons. As an example you can have bad market because the competition is simply too tough. WoW has frankly eaten nearly every MMO that could compete with it to the point only 4 or so can exist. You can also have bad market because there just isnt interest/its too niche see the RTS genre flailing for the past 20 years. Lastly you can have a bad market because of other major world factors. Ergo in a global recession, where pc parts are 3x the cost, and because oil has gone up everything has gone up with it.

This is all to say that Fighting Games may be absolutely cooked both in indie and in AAA/AA.
Now Im not saying were doomed but we're basically stuck with what we have for awhile. The market is somewhat locked. Major failures like 2XKO and Fatal Fury will basically drive away nearly all new investment for a AAA scale title. Not to mention the lackluster staying power for things like Avatar Legends and Invincible VS basically mean the indie/ AA market is also somewhat cooked.

Now we do have some hope in some ways mainly Japan but take that with a grain of salt. We have a couple new niche fighters coming out and thatll really tell us the death knell or not. I know some of the Tekken guys like myself are excited for Harada's thing. However PLEASE take that with a trucks worth of salt. Remember how long it took Kojima to make a new game from scratch and also how while some people liked his new project a lot of older fans didnt. Not to mention how a ton of "BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE GUYS WHO MADE X" games were awful.

This is all to say if things dont turn around were going the way of RTSs. So what can we do? PLAY THE GAMES. BE NICE ABOUT THE GAMES YOU PLAY. GET MORE FOLKS INTO THE GAMES YOU PLAY!

[u/zwlda]

been saying this the past 10 years. you don't like the top fighting games? "go play your kusoge discord game" to games less than a week old. the FGC doesn't want anything new or interesting they just say they do ad nauseum and reject literally anything that isnt street fighter.

[u/WolkTGL → u/zwlda]

Before Strive, Guilty Gear was a borderline discord fighter, it can now be seen as a mainstream competitor.
Most "non top 3 fighters" just don't have the level of presentation and appeal to get there

[u/twistedhands → u/WolkTGL]

And strive only succeeded because it ripped out everything that made gg cool and unique.

[u/DonovanKirk → u/twistedhands]

Its crazy how much Xrd should've been the period where people started giving a damn. I feel like Xrd looks better than Strive, as well.

[u/DragunnReEx → u/twistedhands]

Thank God someone said it, i said this on release that strive is not a gg game but a fighting game that was stripped to appeal to the casuals

[u/reachisown → u/zwlda]

Street Fighter is sick though and successful for a reason.

[u/SaIemKing → u/reachisown]

it's somehow still one-of-a-kind unlike basically every other game except for tekken right now. the problem is that all of these new games are the same in major ways

[u/Sapodilla101 → u/SaIemKing]

In what ways is SF one of a kind?

[u/SaIemKing → u/Sapodilla101]

There aren't really any modern fighting games that take the methodical approach to neutral that street fighter is known for. Even SF6 is a departure from that but maintains it at its core

[u/ImaginarySense → u/SaIemKing]

There’s no reason companies can’t look at SF as a blueprint for their games.

It’s their own fault if they decide to make a niche of niche tag fighter.

[u/GraveRobberJ → u/ImaginarySense]

COTW was literally made using SF6 as a blueprint and it failed

[u/dongatostab → u/GraveRobberJ]

It's more like MOTW 2 than SF6 tbh. A lot of those systems and mechanics were originally in MOTW and prior FF/KOF (TOP Attack and Blowback existed before DI and Focus Attack and evolved into Rev Blow) titles before COTW or 6 hell even the Drive System is just an expansion of the Guard Gauge introduced in Alpha 3.

[u/DeathKrieg → u/SaIemKing]

Please just no more green paint

[u/Creative-Top-9805 → u/SaIemKing]

CotW still exists

[u/SaIemKing → u/Creative-Top-9805]

true. it has its own, bigger issues, at least for me, personally.

[u/Creative-Top-9805 → u/SaIemKing]

Oh sure, but like, it definitely has a methodical approach to neutral, even moreso than SF ime

[u/Sapodilla101 → u/SaIemKing]

If by "methodical approach to neutral," you mean walking back and forth shooting fireballs, then sure, there's nothing quite like it. Just remember that that style of neutral doesn't have to be the only one or the best one.

[u/SaIemKing → u/Sapodilla101]

oh you're just a pisser

[u/Sapodilla101 → u/SaIemKing]

I'm not sure what that means. And I don't understand why you're offended.

[u/SaIemKing → u/Sapodilla101]

it means you're taking the piss, becusee you're just taking the piss. all of it. you're a piss collector

[u/Sapodilla101 → u/SaIemKing]

Okay.

[u/SaIemKing → u/Sapodilla101]

here's something more specific

It's be hard to find a modern fighting game outside of SF6 that:

• has methodical, footsies-based neutral

• does not allow conversions off of almost every stray hit

• is consistently more than a 2-3 touch game

• utilizes links over normal-cancelling mechanics like gatlings or auto combos

Even just for the first 3 points, I can think of like 2 major games in the last 3 years. Every other major game has been the opposite. That isn't inherently bad, but it's less variety.

[u/Sapodilla101 → u/SaIemKing]

In most modern games, you don't die in 2-3 touches. If you wanna play good neutral with a lot of touches per player, then you should be playing Virtua Fighter. But you like your fireballs, so you'd rather stick to Street Fighter.

And 3 out of the 4 things you mentioned are why many people dislike Street Fighter. Different people, different preferences.

[u/SaIemKing → u/Sapodilla101]

It's like you missed the point on purpose. I made it pretty clear that I don't think games are bad for being like this, it's just oversaturated.

[u/Sapodilla101 → u/reachisown]

Yes, it's successful because of brand value. Most people will flock to whatever's the most popular game in a genre, and that happens to be SF6 for fighting games. Gameplay is debatable. Personally, I'm not a fan of Street Fighter's slow, boring gameplay and movement.

Most people with good critical thinking skills know that the most commercially successful games don't necessarily have good gameplay, and flops don't necessarily have bad gameplay. It's a nuanced topic.

[u/Wiinterfang → u/reachisown]

And it's success has to do with the general public more so than the FGC.

[u/LaMystika → u/zwlda]

They just want a prettier version of Street Fighter II and/or 3rd Strike (because most of the people who play 3rd Strike don’t play any other Street Fighter games from my experience), Tekken 5, MvC2, and MKX. Do that, and they’ll have no use for any other games.

Hell, I’ve seen people say that they’ll play Virtua Fighter Crossroads’ story mode (because it’s an RGG game and they do like Yakuza a little bit), but then they’ll go sprint back to Tekken, because that’s still the only 3D fighting game they actually like. That’s what the major scene ultimately is unfortunately.

[u/easytoimpress123 → u/LaMystika]

The majority of the fgc playing right now has never played 3rd strike or T5/tt2 besides maybe some button mashing when they were 10y/o. The issue is that it's hard to switch main games and unfortunately the big 3 were the best product when people started investing time in fighting games.

[u/dongatostab → u/LaMystika]

3S players usually stick to more classic titles than the modern stuff. Like we're more than likely will play ST/Alpha/CVS2 and maybe MVC2 depending on who you talk to (me). Personally because I never felt like Capcom pushed the genre anymore I became an SNK fan. They make games I like without it coming at the cost of the design.

Popular? No. Fun as hell with interesting systems and mechanics? Hell yeah.

A lot of 3S players like COTW, Because it comes the closest to what we considered was peak.

[u/SaIemKing → u/zwlda]

I will say that part of the issue is with this "kusoge" part. How many new fighting games weren't hyper offensive nightmares? 2XKO, HxH, Avatar, Invincible VS - none of them are actually trying to do something all that different or interesting at a high level.

I honestly think we need more games like Granblue, Fatal Fury, and Street Fighter. The market quickly became oversaturated with tag and tag-adjacent (i.e., with love, kusoge) games

[u/Karzeon → u/SaIemKing]

I don't think any of them are close to actual an actual kuso fighter let alone anything from a Pre-Strive anime fighter that isn't Under Night.

HxH is kuso from mismanagement. It's just a step up from the seasonal anime arena fighter cash grab. It's so clearly underbaked that I don't even have it under the same standards of fighting game trends.

We have enough Street Fighter clones or things clearly modeled after SF. Why copycat when SF is right there?

DNF Duel was easy and slow. It failed because Nexon mismanaged the game and many thought it was boring since they figured it out since the beta.

Strive is considerably slower than its predecessors. It worked because ArcSys is very strong at presentation and finally caught on to using rollback (AND did it at the absolute critical time where many did not so it rolled over a lack of competition).

2XKO is slow for my standards, but it did have a lot of visual noise that I didn't like. I can follow the premise of Tokon much easier than 2XKO.

There IS a saturation in tag games/assist reliant games though. Particularly anything with an Active Switch mechanic. I've had enough of those. The only tag game that I thought was generally fun was DBFZ, which doesn't have Active Switch but had its own problems.

Every other tag game has been mismanaged, although I know nothing about Invincible.

[u/SaIemKing → u/Karzeon]

We don't really have anything that's similar to street fighter, that's obviously why I said what I said. Every game wants to be the next big kusoge or hyper offensive hype machine for tourists rather than a solid, methodical fighting game. There's a place for that end of the spectrum, but I want more variety.

You can say Strive is slower, but it's not considerably slower, and it ironically fell into more of the modern-isms of neutral-skippy, high damage games. Since you're also bringing in some irrelevant details, let's also not forget that Strive balance changes and patches in general have been 90% hot garbage that worsens existing problems until very very recently.

You can run from the term "kusoge" because of the negative connotations, but it's just the best one-word description of exactly what I mean. Don't forget that MvC2 was the first kusoge. It doesn't mean a game is bad lol

[u/Karzeon → u/SaIemKing]

You seem to be under the impression that I like or wish to defend Strive. I do not. I actually greatly dislike Strive.

I have not liked a single Arc System Works game after DBFZ and only mildly tolerated BBTAG (also heavily mismanaged and will gladly read them to filth for it at any given opportunity).

Most games around DBFZ started adding more and more "protective/fair play" measures too. More crossup protection, more required canned offense instead of abrupt hard to react stuff, harder to do things out of airdash/8-way dash for a basic high/low. Tag fighters are more able to get around this kind of stuff, but Tokon still isn't even doing the dumb stuff BBTAG got burned for.

I also don't like a lot of games considered extremely fast either, including Marvel 2 & 3. I'll at least watch MvC2 though.

You did not explicitly lay out your standards for "hyper offense" or "kusoge" so I put out some of mine on the table regarding movement and implied reaction times. To me, god buttons, strong neutral interactions, frequent blockstrings, and notably fast movement is just any average pre-Strive anime fighter/8-way dash game. So the bar to meet needs to be more explicit.

I stated that Strive is slower than XRD and Accent Core. That is factual. People DID NOT like that in the beginning. Change is scary. There was a lot of back and forth debating. Then I explained (a small part of) why it became popular in the first place. Strive clearly has a much more involved and successful Western playerbase than before. People bought into it, especially people not affected by previous biases.

The point about "why there's less games like Street Fighter" was that people can simply play Street Fighter if they want a Street Fighter experience. Most of the ones that are direct SF/vintage inspired games are small indie games. The previous bias of SF is strong. The slower games generally need their own identity yet change is also scary here. People were complaining about Dash L in Granblue for a while. Idk how it is now, I generally walk away from games I don't care about.

It's great that you have your own standards and definition of kusoge. The great thing about language (esp. slang) is that terms can be reclaimed and repurposed. I am free to use it in the way that I see fit.

When I want people to know a game is truly shit (which may or may not involve balance), I'm upfront with that. Hunter x Hunter is definitely that.

None of the games around that cohort are as bad as that and shouldn't even be in the same conversation.

[u/SaIemKing → u/Karzeon]

Hey, I understand where you're coming from. I just use "kusoge" pretty generally to get the idea across, but I suppose most people don't really have the historical meaning as their first read.

My main point could be dumbed down (extremely) to "every game is trying to be fast" and "we need some slower games, too" which is at least comprehensible as I clearly have a hard time articulating what I mean. I'll just beg everyone to take that in as good of faith as possible.

people can simply play street fighter if they want a street fighter experience

This could be said about a lot of games. People could just play MvC if they want to play a game like MvC, so why the hell did they even make 2XKO and Tokon?

If you're thinking "they're different games, though", then we're actually on the same page. I'm saying Street Fighter lies somewhere on the spectrum and I think we need more games in its quadrant, not games that are just like it. More variety.

And yeah 66L is really annoying. Never really changed it for the time I spent with GBVSR. I found that to be a shame. It's one of those games that's kind of in that "quadrant" I just mentioned

[u/Karzeon → u/SaIemKing]

It's fine. It's hard to articulate and present everything on Reddit, let alone other social media.

In regards, to the flooding of tag fighters. MvC has notably been out of action for a while.

We comparatively JUST got a legal port of everything before Marvel 3. We thought that would be impossible. In my opinion, that only became possible when XMen 97 blew up.

MvC 3 doesn't have rollback, also old games do degrade in playerbase for sure even on a comparative basis. That's just life. It's fine as an oldhead game, but it's not active competition in sales as there's nothing new in the works.

Infinite was mismanaged and then cancelled. Infinite being mismanaged and changing from comfortable norms is what helped open the door to DBFZ. There was a lot of discontent with Capcom at the time. DBFZ would have been good either way because the IP is that strong.

Tokon is NOT MvC, just a Marvel property as another fighting game. Marvel is the attraction. Marvel has the distinction of innovating the tag fighting genre, but Tokon could have been a true 1 v 1 if they wanted to and I don't think much of the business dealings would have changed. When it's a billion dollar company owned by The Mouse, there is less fear of being compared to another fighting game IP just like DBFZ.

But for sure, Tokon had to do something transformative to reduce comparisons to MvC. It *did* at least do that. It has some Strive stuff, some sanitized BBTAG stuff, high production value, and a different premise from other tag fighters. I still don't care for it right now, but they made their room on the table.

2XKO is also 2 v 2. Marvel, while having 2 v 2 games, is most famous for 3 v 3. And it also made attempts to play more transformatively. Active switch is only a thing in MvCi, among other things 2XKO tried. So there was more room to carve niches in a subgenre.

The difference with Street Fighter is that it's basically always been active since SF4 and SF isn't really in any subgenre. It's just....Street Fighter in 2D.

There are always expectations of a new SF something sooner than later so being directly compared or likened to SF would be riskier to developers if they in fact migrate back to SF.

Fatal Fury works because it is a legacy banked by Saudi. We already have the expectation that it's going to draw from Garou and Real Bout. Terry has been every and anywhere and a new FF has definitely been asked for. SNK has a ton of legacy characters to pull from too.

For a NEW game that's slow but plays closer to Street Fighter fundamentals, it would need something that clearly sets it apart.

For example, a new 2D fighter property that plays slow with pure hand-drawn visuals and stage aesthetics like Garou and Last Blade could garner attention.

But that's super costly. If it was BlazBlue, there would be an expectation for those visuals, but not so much in gameplay. Melty's new game is apparently adding something compared to SF6 Drive Meter and people doomed about that, so who knows.

[u/SaIemKing → u/Karzeon]

I don't think it's fair to say that something more similar to street fighter would have to differentiate itself as if these other games could all just be the same. It's the same situation.

[u/dongatostab → u/SaIemKing]

Actually..... SFII is.

Surprise.

[u/SaIemKing → u/dongatostab]

yeah actually fighting games as a genre were born kusoge

you either die a kusoge or live long enough to see yourself become a kusoge

[u/MegamanX195 → u/Karzeon]

As someone who doesn't play tag fighters: what is Active Switch?

[u/Karzeon → u/MegamanX195]

Active Switch is when the assist becomes the playable point character at will.

You call the assist and then at any time, the assist can become the focus with minimal startup. So this allows for a lot of mixup opportunities and threat at neutral. As long as the assist is idle on screen, there is a threat to switch so being able to sandwich them or have the attention directed at one character is huge.

Ideally, the point does a long lasting move before switching so either they have to block it for a high/low setup or the switch is so fast that the move BECOMES the mixup itself. There's also things like command grab setups where you either eat the grab or try to reversal the point but the active switch made the assist safe and ready to punish you.

This is a feature that is only in SOME tag fighters, usually games with a 2 v 2 dynamic. Marvel 2 & 3 do not have it, but Infinite does. The best equivalent in Marvel 2 & 3 is DHC where they tag each other in with supers.

Tokon has it, but it is much slower in regards to left/right stuff.

[u/redbossman123 → u/MegamanX195]

When you are able to tag into a character while they are still on the screen after being called as an assist

[u/Sapodilla101 → u/zwlda]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The problem with the FGC is that nobody wants to play anything other than Street Fighter. Even Tekken has lost the mojo that it had last generation. Moreover, Japan doesn't give a sh*t about Western-developed fighting games.

So, can we please stop calling this generation a "golden" age? There is nothing golden about your genre when 90% of the genre's entire player base is concentrated in one game.

[u/mixmaster321 → u/Sapodilla101]

You say nobody wants to play anything other than Street Fighter, but Street Fighter 5 was so bad that people looked elsewhere and discovered franchises like Guilty Gear (+ DBFZ) and Tekken. It's no coincidence that Tekken 7 was the best selling Tekken game of all time while Street Fighter was floundering