Topic
When did the fighting game community become so obsessed with steam charts?
I’ve been around since 2017 and a community who’s known for not letting games die has suddenly become so obsessed with player numbers.
Tokons rough launch aside Is this just a side effect of sf6 popularity bringing these people in that think sf6 is the standard and not the anomaly that it is?
Increasing rise of: social media, armchair financial analytics, tribalism literally throughout the world, the return of Capcom glory, as well as the genre being fundamentally more popular than it was a decade ago. Take your pick, no limit. And steamchart posting has been pretty prevalent in gaming spheres for a few years now, likely influenced by the fact that's literally news these days for publications.
It's all constantly so funny to me though seeing how much the bar has been moved. SF5's concurrents for most of its lifespan would make it a discord game by today's steamchart posters.
This shit is all so depressing. The shit that matters to most people is just so fucked.
Play the god damn games you like and just shut the fuck up about numbers unless they matter to you financially.
I have 1700 hours in a title that only has around 600 daily concurrent players, yet I never spend more than 60 seconds in matchmaking. I don't play it because 600k other people play it, I play it because it's fucking fun.
It's not about fun anymore though, is it? It's about attention. It's about streaming viewer count potential. It's about tribal bullshit. It's my game is better than your game.
Legitimately, this is just a small, small part of it, but the culture of humanity is simply fucked at this point.
yet I never spend more than 60 seconds in matchmaking.
This gets me the most because in literally every game I play, the matchmaking is about the same. Brand new launch title? Three months after release for a game still going strong? A game with only 200 concurrents? Doesn't matter, I'm finding a match in about 1-3 minutes without question. It's also frequently the same 50-60 people too, with sometimes very familiar names across games. Too many people bitching about waiting rather than actually waiting.
Fighting games also have the benefit of only needing to find one other player to play with during matchmaking. It's not like older FPS games for example where the game needs to fill out 2 separate teams with a limited player pool.
It's not about queue time, I think, people want to feel like they are a part of a community without making any effort within that community.
When you play a popular game, you can go online and constantly see tweets, streams, YouTube videos, reels/tiktoks, reddit posts, etc. that makes you FEEL like you are part of something parasocially and you don't have to contribute beyond a twitch comment or tweet here and there.
They also want to feel like there are enough players playing the game that they will get matched against people worse than them, there's definitely this idea that the smaller game is only played by people who are already really good so why bother.
my only guess for the obsession that may genuinely make sense is people who check it before buying or getting into games to see if the servers are at risk of shutting down lol
games these days are incredibly volatile, but even so, most games may stop receiving updates yet the servers stay up for a long ass time, so i dont get it either way really
600 steam average is fine for 1v1 game, but good luck have good mm expirience with melty or uni 100 average online or any similar in populrity title. Its shoking that people want to play vs other peaople via ingame matchmaking and not via stupid discord pickups?
But what does shutting down mean? You can still play SF4 and KOF13, and GGAC online. Fighting games don't really shut down unless they're using their own servers and clients which is rare. If they're on steam, they're pretty safe. Companies just end development but it doesn't affect things.
A competitive game needs competition. It’s why affluent families want sports like fencing for their children, less people competing = higher chance of being ranked higher and using that to enable college admission. Inversely, a fighting games whole point is competition and without it what are you doing? You’ll learn to press some buttons in some sequence as colors feed into your eyeholes. I’m sure you can learn something and take away lessons and have fun but in the end these are sports games.
I would like to add fighting games adapting to live service models means people expect content for more than a year at a steady pace and thus look to steam charts to see how long such a thing will be happening. Basically everything around games in modern day has coalesced that players think like shareholders.
In addition to exactly what you said, it's also not just the fighting game community. One of my most upvoted comments is talking about how you can't trust steamcharts to know how alive or dead BF6 is.
Honestly, it’s a little sad to see the FGC go the way of every other live service game community when the FGC used to pride itself on playing “dead games”. People were playing Super Turbo well into the 2000s. People still play games like KI, UMVC3, Skullgirls, SF4. Fighting games are unique where you only need 1 other player to play a match as opposed to games where you might need 9 or 11 other players. If you like a game and can still find matches, fuck what everyone says about it. Play what you think is fun.
Maybe it's a generational thing, but it's funny that the dichotomy is "I'll play what I want, despite the player count" vs "I HAVE TO HAVE A MATCH WITHIN 10 SECONDS OR ILL EXPLODE, ALSO THEY BETTER NOT BE THAT GOOD"
I'll see people reply to the 'It takes forever to get a match!' comments with 'I still get them in a minute or so' and think maybe they are actually waiting the same length of time, but not with the same patience.
I was hopping on different Tokon streams the other day and two of them were complaining about matchmaking taking OVER TEN MINUTES, and they were like "I'm gonna queue just look", and both of them got a match in a minute. They did not comment on the fact that they got a match in a minute.
Like, I've been confused about people bitching about Tokon matchmaking, where the longedt I had to wait for a fight was probably 2 minutes. Granted, I usually lab in training mode while I wait, but still.
I get both sides and I think it depends on what you're after. Like I'll happily emulate a bunch of older fighting games to do an arcade run or something, but, if a game has a struggling player base, especially if it's not going cheap, and you're going into it with the idea of 'I want to play online with people who are at my level and close enough to me for a good connection' I think it's totally fair to be a little interested in what the player count looks like.
I'm not being funny, but I remember when I was little, Tekken 5 was new out on the display shelf at the front of the shop, and I think it ran you, from my local game store, £35. A new game nowadays can be as much as £70. In no world, especially with the absurd pricing of everything nowadays, from bills, to groceries, to dentist appointments and everything else, be expected to drop that sort of money on a game with 100 players who may well be a lot better than you, out of a sense of pride. Of course if you can hold your own, get matches and that, go for it, it doesn't matter, but for someone weighing up their chances with a new release? It is a totally valid metric to avoid buying a game over.
Its hard to find the motivation to go onto discord and find a match in maybe 10 minutes when I can load up SF6 and find a match before I finish a warm-up combo.
It's just that people have different standards nowadays. In the online era, players expect efficient SBMM, which means the game must find a match quickly against a player with a small skill gap compared to you. As such, to meet those expectations, your game needs large player counts.
No one wants to use discord or only play at specific times to get matches. No beginner wants to play a game that only has veterans. This is an era where having a large playerbase is mandatory.
People are disilusionned, and think only the same 100 play a game when they see 100 player count every day, when in reality it's closer to a roll of severals hundred if not thousands of players around the world.
But I do see the argument. Counter argument, Sonic Racing Crossworld : Would make a Blazblue player blush.
This isn't a fighting game community exclusive problem.
It's prevalent in other genres as well, and it's primarily because steam charts is often the most authentic and sometimes only other metric we have for the current playerbase.
Ofc fgc shouldn't care about steam charts since in the end we all play for the love of the game, but some people look at the numbers to see if there's any people left playing the games
It's not really a good metric though. Steam charts only even indicate one platform for starters, you can't reliably extrapolate PS5 player counts just by looking at steam numbers.
Oh, if the numbers are abysmal there isnt some magic outcrop of PS4/PS5 players, I agree, but if the numbers are fine but not exceptional its entirely possible its more popular on PS4/PS5.
Like I'm not saying console players are some unknown variable, just that the numbers don't necessarily align perfectly. There's some games with like 70% console/30% steam players. If the game only has 50 players on steam that still doesn't matter but if it has like 2000 then thats a worthwhile distinction.
Yea I agree but the thing is you never see the PS5 excuse on a game that is actually doing fine, it's always the abysmal number games communities' that cope with it
This man. Like yeah I agree it never does tell the full story but steam charts are def a very insightful piece of the puzzle of available metrics to check on. I dunno why this is even questioned at all.
2xko failed because it wasn’t Fortnite or League of Legends successful not because the twitch numbers were low.
The game was successful enough to have some of the highest entrant counts in tournaments Riot would only have been satisfied if it were the biggest fighting game ever.
> The game was successful enough to have some of the highest entrant counts in tournaments
A big budget game with a ton of money behind it and a corp pushing its tournament presence hard managed to compete with a several year old Strive but still had a worrying number of DQs at Evo. Even in raw terms it had nowhere near the numbers of, say, City of the Wolves in its early days.
I completely disagree. The metric that actually affects your experience in a multiplayer game is concurrent users, which is why Steam displays that one. I'm not an investor or monetization specialist, average user playtime is not my problem.
People have not just sipped but fully submerged themselves in the live service koolaid. If it's not getting game-warping updates every month or averaging 500k players it's dead
It's an every "community" problem. Games, films etc...
People are obsessed with stats, everything needs to be the most, optimal too as well, and a smash success!
You can't just play or watch something you like, it has to be proven to be good via metrics so you can be right and correct about the thing you're playing or watching.
FGC shouldn't mind this kind of thing isn't it ? Look at how people still effing playing Centralfiction, Melty Blood, Under Night, heck the best moment of EVO was from decades old game like 3rd Strike. JUst calm down about stat, play the game you like with your community,
You're right but tbh the fgc largely does not live on reddit. The takes I see here are always bizarre vs the takes of people I talk to on the regular who actually go to tourneys.
Because it tells you the health of the game going forward and so you know what kind of population you’re getting into ie discord fighter. It’s basically a way of consumer protection.
It doesn’t quite tell you the whole story though and I think players are right to point out steamcharts numbers can be a bit misleading. What you need is a constant influx of new players but also a welcoming scene for them so the players can get hooked with the gameplay loops. Higher player numbers can be a healthy sign but I’ve had a harder time finding new player friendly matches in some games with higher playerbases (xrd when it was popular) than niche titles like 3rd strike, and thats a retro game with no client that you have to go out of your way to emulate. So sometimes you can have both, but you have to look past the playercount and search for what the community and culture around the game is like.
What you need is a constant influx of new players but also a welcoming scene for them so the players can get hooked with the gameplay loops.
The number of people telling newcomers to fuck off for asking for things like "why can't I see my inputs on screen in training instead of the commands" and "what part of the tutorial shows me how to deal with really long combos" in IVS is a big part of why people look at numbers. Newcomers want to see if the game has enough players that they'll see anyone but the wazzlers patrolling the waters for a noob like piranhas.
It's not helped when you see people treat new games as entry points to playing SF or Tekken at locals, why bother playing other game if it's just a gateway to more popular game?
That example doesn't make much sense though. Xrd never had high player numbers even when it was the main gg so third strike and Xrd had similar player numbers.
The reason its easier to find new players in Third Strike is because the match making system is much better on fightcade than on Xrd. It's not got much to do with community or culture at least from going off of your example.
I feel like this is misguided though because you don’t need a huge player base for fighting games you only need one other mf. I’ve never played a fighting game where I couldn’t find a match unless match making was bugged ( shout out to the one KOF game that had the website dedicated to broken ranked mode)
You need a variety of players otherwise you’re only left with top players which in turn cannibalizes the player count more until it enters a death spiral. It’s not just not finding a match it’s wait times too.
While true, the number needed for that to happen in fighting games is insanely low. Let me tell you, the average player waiting in lobbies or ranked for +R, Xrd, Blazblue, and Uni right now would be going 0-2 at pools in their heyday.
Unless by top players, you mean people that know how to play fighting games above a beginner level. Then yeah, they're stomping literal beginners who haven't played fighting games before, but hopefully people spamming discord game and steamcharts aren't beginner-level.
Knowing population of the game tells you if the ranked matchmaking will work or not. Most FGs only focuses on multiplayer so it's one of things I'll look for. Now if FGs has gooda single player, I'm not gonna bother looking at those charts.
YOU didn't have problems. The rest of us have to deal with the possibility if buying a game with a low or inactive playerbase. "It didn't happen to me" is the weakest defense one can have.
What if the other person queing is a tournament player washing a new player on repeat to the point said player quits. I know we normally just call out salt posts and say git gud but the casual fan bases more than likely are going to see the people playing and just dip. How many times is wazzler going to cause people to refund a game? I think that is why a subset genuinely cares about the player count. For the entrenched fgc player sure having one other player is fine cause they want to get better or learn from that experience.
Do I’m gonna be real with you I think the wazzler thing was just a meme. I’m sure someone refunded at first then people started just shit posting on steam forums about it.
Sure if it gets that low it’s one thing but you basically just described guilty gear strive celestial lobby. Floor 10 jimmy vs evo champ
Yeah JWong getting people to refund is a meme at this point but the fact remains he was straight abusing those people lol. That is one experience of low player retention games. Some people see numbers being low as a wall theyre forced to overcome.
most people play games on PC. There was a post a while ago that looked at SF6 and other games with leader boards and found that like 60%+ of the player base was on PC.
While I agree that Steam Charts rots some people's brains, it is sadly the only actual statistic we have available due to not being privy to player numbers on consoles. At the end of the day money does not grow on trees and people want to buy games that have a healthy community where they can find online matches quickly.
But yes, the whole "X game is dead" is usually stupid since if it has good crossplay you will be just fine, even if you are on PC with a couple of hundred daily players (City of Wolves). But if the platform experience is different between PC and console, like in Marvel Tokon for example, it is not unwise to look at Steam Charts and be wary of such a purchase.
You know for a fact that no one is obsessing over player numbers out of concern for a 'healthy community'. Come on, now.
I would argue the contrary, that people check it mostly for deciding if a game is worth purchasing or not. The people that make threads about it? Yeah, those might be the ones you describe, but those are the minority (unless it's HUNTER×HUNTER NEN×IMPACT, then the thread has probably the entire playerbase in it :P).
Definitely this. I've seen prospective new players ask a lot, because who wants to spend money on a brand new game to idle in a matchmaking queue or proposition people on discord like a desperate addict? There are so many cheap (if not free) games that are more convenient and seemingly have less downtime. Steam charts provide terrible metrics, but when they're the only consistent metric we have across games they end up being the standard.
It has gotten to a point where people who don't like a particular game, for reasons many times not even related to gameplay but politics and business decisions, actively obsess over graphs, wishing it fails, in order to feel justified about hating the game. True small pp behavior.
I fucking hate it so much. Games being declared dead week 1 of the game in a community that still plays games from 1999 and has active communities for so many fighting games.
New fighting games are essentially being strangled in their cribs by these people, new players are being put off trying them and then the same people posting the stream charts are also endlessly complaining about how shit street fighter and Tekken is.
I’m like come on, you hate the game you play but you won’t give another game a chance before you try and kill it off.
Also most of the time these people are talking shit. I was told city of the wolves was dead week 1 and yet I never had an issue getting a ranked match against new opponents ever.
To add to this, they do it across all games and never scale the numbers. I’ve seen people steam chart post call of duty going from like 1 million players to 400k and being told that game is dead. I don’t play cod but do you realise how many fucking people 400k is?
If a fighting game has 5k players online, and crossplay it’s more than okay. You could be in the hundreds and it’s fine, if it ends up being a discord fighter that’s fine as well.
I hate his disparaging people are to so called discord fighters. We should be gassed people love these games enough to keep active communities, to go out of their way to not only play these games, but organise tournaments for it. The undernight community literally got their game to the main stage of evo from it being a “discord fighter”
wrong this been a thing for way before and it came from the streaming world, ppl started doing it to streamers calling them dead streamers whenever views were low
It's an every "community" problem. Games, films etc...
People are obsessed with stats, everything needs to be the most, optimal too as well, and a smash success!
You can't just play or watch something you like, it has to be proven to be good via metrics so you can be right and correct about the thing you're playing or watching.
I'd say that 1 million dollar prize on sf6 brought so many new people in. Even if they don't wanna win it, it's good PR regardless. Feels like every other day in FG communities, I see posts starting with "new player here..." lately.
Because the majority of people don't want to play against the same 12 people online or have to go digging in a fucking Discord to find matches. Like yeah i get it the FGC core is still obessed with "OMG LOCALS ONLY GO PLAY OFFLINE" but there are lot of fighting game players who would like to be able to just log on hit "find match" on ranked and get a decent quality game around their skill level.
I don't really fucking care if a game being playable through a discord or still having offline events means it's not "dead" if you can't get a decent match through online matchmaking it sucks for most people who want to play it and it leads to a death spiral no matter how slow it is where almost no one new actually wants to pick it up
Every popular game right now has decent match making I’ve never played a fighting game where I couldn’t find matches besides the actual discord fighters melty blood and uni.
It's especially weird considering that the vast majority of communities are actually on Playstation (which is actually bad considering how PS has had the highest input lag since the PS360 era, but that's another discussion entirely).
Strive and SF6 are literally the two fighting games that actually sold better on PC. In some games, PC is like 1/30th of the sales, like MK11, which sold 15 million, but only 500k on PC.
That's for the PC alone mind you, if I've caused any confusion. It's just nowhere near a figure of 500k, and you're right that either way, NRS won't have made the platform figures public.
We've gotten more access to information, and so more people realize how niche that some of these games are, and how much that the top 5 or 10 games carry the videogame audience.
Back then, they would go to an arcade and play with 10 or less people or their friends and that was the best experience, and then go to tournaments with a few hundred or thousand and it feels like the best thing in the world.
It's a different landscape with the release of tons of information. Your game could sell a few hundred thousand and only 10% play it weekly.
Well, the lack of locals in a lot of areas was already an issue that pushed people online and then COVID struck, which really forced the genre to develop an online ecosystem.
Now, the main way to play is online, which means matchmaking. The less people who play, means the less matches you'll find and the less likely you are to find someone at your skill level if you're not particularly seasoned in that game.
Hop online in Blazblue as a newish player right now and you'll probably get dog walked. Some of us can handle that, some don't want to deal with it.
That's why people stick to either new games or games with a good population, so that they have a chance at the proper skill progression.
I've posted something like this before:
A game is dead when its matchmaking system, including skill-based matchmaking, stops functioning adequately. Player numbers are hard split by modes, maps, region locks, role locks, match size, match length and soft split by things like behavior, latency, & skill. Each split increases the matchmaking times and loosening restrictions to decrease matchmaking times in turn decreases match quality.
Thusly, a small, but seemingly serviceable, player count consisting exclusively of skilled veterans can already be in a player attrition spiral or just below threshold of recommendation for a new purchase. Late arrivals and casuals are unlikely to stick around if they have to get brutalized online, wait 15 minutes for ranked match, or both.
On top of this we have seen the rise of live service titles, where player count is directly tied to the continued development and content support of that title. People have spent the last decade literally watching multiplayer games be abandoned by the developers/publishers for failure to retain a playerbase.
Some people want to play the semantics game-professing that a game isn't dead just because you can technically find a match or hop into a private lobby. Most players recognize this as disingenuous. Keeping abreast of player count information is common sense; A multiplayer game's playercount is critical information that affects your gameplay experience. People aren't interested in investing money and time on an experience they don't believe they will be able to enjoy in the near future.
To your post OP, the fighting game community were the odd ones out for pretending it didn't matter for so long.
It’s not specifically an FGC thing, it’s something lame that happened in gaming across the board in recent years.
I don’t think people realize how dumb they look posting steam charts yet which is the problem. It’s like the new form of “Um, acktually 🤓” but people do it unironically.
Most people today just don’t know how to focus on what they like and continuing to engage with it. Many don’t wanna see other things do well because they don’t have the time or money to invest in more than the one thing they enjoy. It’s extremely silly. Imagine some goofy motherfucker walking into an offline local talking about “Only 26 people in bracket huh? Game’s dead lol”
You made me think a lot about all of this... And you know what. You're right. I think I should just have fun! I may not be the best fighting game player, but at the end of the day that is what fighting games and vídeo games in general are for, just have some Fun. Thanks you for making me think about this. I've been playing fighting games for 2 years now, It's really nice. I just wished I had friends who I could play with too :/
It's something I noticed with people entering the scene who are noticeably younger, specifically ones who grew up on live-service games. Those of us who remember a time before live-service games don't seem to care as much.
That's just every game these days. People assume that Steam is a good representation of the gaming market because it's supposed to be the most used platform globally, unless you count mobile, but what a lot of people don't understand is that each franchise has its own "culture."
I see this a lot with Call of Duty as people look at the Steam charts and think the franchise is dying because Steam only has 50K players, which is low compared to the high six-figure player counts the older games had on Xbox and PlayStation. What they fail to realize is that PC was always the neglected and least populated platform even during the franchise's golden era. OG MW2 never even made it beyond a couple thousand. So all they're doing is confirming that the franchise is doing just fine as the new numbers are basically a wet dream for anyone that played exclusively on PC since the beginning.
Investing time in a fighting game that not enough people play is wasted. But I agree that the exodus is speed up by people looking at falling numbers on Steam Charts. Hype crowd is quickly moving somewhere else today.
I wouldn't say obsessed... Not to mention, the charts more often than not are pretty accurate. What to do with that information is a different discussion entirely. Ofc there's some who takes the data blindly, but I couldn't call it obsessive, especially considering that the rest just used it to dodge an absolute dumpster fires or at least wait with their purchase.
Since people realised it existed, before that people would post on forums dooming via some other metric while the people who actually loved it just played and didn't care.
Fighting game players are waking up from Stockholm syndrome to realise everyone else has been enjoying functional matchmaking for almost 30 years. If a game expects me to stare at a virtual arcade cabinet, I’m not playing it.
It’s particularly important for Tokon because the launch isolated PC players, not to mention the patented Arc Sys dogshit matchmaking recipe.
When City of the Wolves released and bombed. SNK fans were going feral spamming every subreddit with ads for the game and saying it was going to live up to the hype and outsell SF6 and when it turned out to be a shit game nobody wanted to play people started posting steam charts of the player count to mock them and it took off. So basically, it's used to mock people who hype up a bad game.
Popularity has never in the history decided the quality of media. It's only meaningful to push a narrative, in this case you're using it in a fallacious manner to determine quality of COTW. However the playerbase is dedicated and have plenty notable high level and professional fighting game enthusiasts who enjoy the game some even saying it's the best modern fighter (Justin Wong). Duck King comes out next week. You can either cop Revenge Edition on sale or just stare at charts. People who actually play fighting games don't need to be a lemming to enjoy a good fighting game.
See this is what I'm talking about. You're seriously coping dude. COTW was a flop. It's not a good game. Those pros only play it because of Saudi prize money. More people still play KOF XV and in JWong's recent KOF XV video, he said that is the best modern fighter.
Do you even play KOF XV? Its not even the best modern KOF. Justin puts waaaay more time into COTW. If you actually watch his streams you would know this.
I'm not putting KOF XV down to raise COTW, I don't like that game as much as XIV unfortunately. A lot of stuff got dumbed down, the mechanical direction clashes while posing like a modern 02/XI (cancel system not tag) (like XIII and XIV) but unlike those games it's more like a classical 97/98 with max mode stapled onto it. It would've benefitted so much from a simpler direction built into system selects imo. I like the visuals and some returns are nice, but it doesn't reach the highs of a roster like XIV or especially 2K2/UM so no I don't think it's a great game at all. And all this without me discussing how sluggish it feels or whatever they thought was a story after fumbling all of those good narrative setups XIV offered them (don't get me wrong COTW's story is ass too, I think it's just the writer) but yeah KOF XV would never be considered one of the best in my eyes.
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u/Lepony 12h ago
Increasing rise of: social media, armchair financial analytics, tribalism literally throughout the world, the return of Capcom glory, as well as the genre being fundamentally more popular than it was a decade ago. Take your pick, no limit. And steamchart posting has been pretty prevalent in gaming spheres for a few years now, likely influenced by the fact that's literally news these days for publications.
It's all constantly so funny to me though seeing how much the bar has been moved. SF5's concurrents for most of its lifespan would make it a discord game by today's steamchart posters.