Fighting Games-Punching Above Their Weight

[@katsutama]

I'm glad that this channel is still alive, one of the best in FGC. Thanks for the video!

[@Shining4Dawn]

Another excellent video! I've come to a point where PBW videos are as pleasant a surprise as a Core-A Gaming video. I'm fairly sure that with the exception of F2P, Mortal Kombat 11 checks all of those boxes (although crossplay is only available on XBox and Playstation). You never know, there's a possibility that Netherrealms' next game will be the big F2P fighting game hit no one expected. NRS have been really good at preventing leaks in recent years, so it's really hard to tell what they're working on until they make official announcements.

[@KTSamurai1]

one thing that doesn't come up a lot until it's time to play a match is optimization and design. it's absolutely ridiculous that fighting games are still releasing levels that lag the match or obscure a characters' feet or where the players are in the level. this kind of thing is completely unacceptable in every other genre yet every modern fighting game has a long list of banned levels for those exact reasons it really shows how devs have been dragging their feet and taking their audiences for granted. our levels are not always useable, our lobbies are unwieldly and annoying, we dont always get a REMATCH button... like, what are these guys doing? someone is absolutely going to eat their lunch if they dont shape up and get with the program. theyre not hitting so many baselines and it's just pure intertia from never having to improve too much

[@AuntBibby]

the checkboxes at 7:34… are u sure Brawlhalla doesnt check all of em? it’s free, it’s quick to jump into online, it has a simple UI, it’s on every platform…. it’s really popular too, lots of players.

[@greatestgamer00]

Thats a platformer/party fighter game. Defs doing better than i expected seing as i forgot it existed after launch untill recent discovery of it boomin. But yea he means traditional 2d fighters like sfv,gg and kof. Regardless the fact its not an established IP and at base level to most nooblets its the same genre it further helps to prove the model can work

[@pressbuttonwin]

Fair point! I think what I'm looking for is the combination of big budget + those checkboxes. Otherwise, even aside from Brawlhalla, you could argue things like Fantasy Strike also check those boxes as well. For better or for worse, presentation and IP play a large role in fighting game success, so I think we really need to see those checkboxes + large budget + big IP. If Capcom offers some ftp version of SF6, we might see it there. I think Project L will be an attempt as well. I'm curious to see how things pan out!

[@tobyrayserrano258]

Great video! I love this channel, always excited for the next one.

[@rick2402]

Hey man! Another great video. Keep it up!

[@ThatFairyBoy]

It's even been amazing to me seeing how some random things from fighting games break through into mainstream culture. Like, if I mention to someone I play Guilty Gear, maybe if they are a gamer they'll respond "oh isn't that the cool looking anime fighting game?" And then even people who don't recognize the game itself almost always know about "the Jack-O pose" because of how it became a challenge trend on TikTok to recreate her crouching animation. I have to wonder too, with how popular Smash Bros. is and how many entrants competitive tournaments get consistently, how much more successful and far-reaching could the competitive scene be with good online, and *real* developer support? Imagine Nintendo backing an International tournament like the Dota 2 one.

[@kardrasa]

Free to play and easier ways to connect with people would do a lot for building a community. In a game like MK11 I can't even add people on PC or view their profile to see more about the person I just played. Finding people to spar with is very important for improving in a fighting game and devs should prioritize making that easier. Also more group activities like KotH or timed in game timed tournaments would do so much for building a community.

[@LoudButtons]

This channel kind of reminds me of Thinking Basketball, but for fighting games. Glad you're still uploading.

[@juicemonger3872]

You made another video, SWEET. I pretty much agree with this entire video. Well articulated.

[@elk2594]

Dude this is Core A gaming quality content and your points would make Sajam proud. Keep it up!

[@TheKingOfReading]

I get reasonably pumped with each upload. And of COURSE this one delivers!

[@ToadManJon11]

Awesome to have have you back, and great video :)

[@Choochificational]

the king is back!

[@metalgeartrusty]

regarding this vid, how would you say Multiversus went? would you say it checked all the boxes? is it excluded from this conversation for not being a traditional fighter? nothing really kept it alive after the EVO side tourney i feel. selling fighting games, and keeping their playerbases alive, is complicated and difficult.

[@JohanMGO]

I love your channel. Core-A vibes

[@seldomsadsam]

Never pressed sooner!! Such an amazing channel you have!

[@ShadyHitchhiker]

You are best in the biz for FGC video essays. Some of the editing was too good. I think you're right about casual MOBA viewership compared to FGs, I had my nephew staying with me for one of the big LOL tournaments, and I tried watching him with him. Over an entire weekend of watching games, I still had no idea what was going on, and he seemed to not react to big plays occuring, but react 5 seconds before a big play happened because he knew it was coming based on mythical combination of factors outside my understanding I was and am still dumbfounded to what is going on in a LOL match at any level

[@MrBakaboy]

The problem is most issues have been solved in the 360/PS3 era, and developers players or console makers have moved away from it. 1. Have a system where people can go into a room. Spectate, talk and play with anyone there. Fighters are easy and fun to watch, but scary for beginners to try. This can be circumvented by vets offering to show the newbs the ropes. This was normal on the 360 for years, but once everything went to PS4 this resource dried up making learning a daunting challenge. 2. Link all of your titles together showing how many people are online. Games die because nobody knows when people want to play the titles. Back on PS3 the Neo Geo Station made a system where you can look at all of their titles all at once if anybody is waiting on games. So you could show up on KOF 96 and realize someone is waiting on Samurai Shodown. This could be a game changer in many ways, but it failed because it was implemented late in the Neo Geo Station's life cycle. So I don't think developers know how big of a deal it was. 3. Wi-Fi detector. Many people don't understand how bad playing fighting games on Wi-Fi is. On 360 early days Wi-Fi had to be bought separately so it wasn't used as much. Nowadays the majority think it's either okay or worth it to get an advantage. Tekken 7 showed a Wi-Fi detector can be used to shame the Wi-Fi warriors to stop abusing the connection. No it won't solve it, but it will help.

[@pressbuttonwin]

1. I agree; it's wild that new fighting games seem to launch very barebones without standard features that other games have had for years. 2. I think the best case scenario is having so many people playing a game that you can get matches literally whenever you want (without having to check anything). 3. Project L is apparently doing something where if one player has a bad connection, it only negatively impacts that player (and the player with a good connection will have a good experience). This kind of seems like the holy grail; if wi-fi players are only ruining their own experience, we don't have to care anymore.

[@jpVari]

The only part I disagree with is the ranked play issue. If you wanna jump in a game fast, how does a non ranked system keep completely new players from hitting top level people? Or do you just mean hidden mmr without a goal of ranking up? I support that... Just otherwise you have weird matchmaking or room type things which for me personally, I am not saying I wouldn't use them but I want to get in a match without thinking or picking. Within a minute of joining, like you said. It's not a laziness thing, I'll absolutely take rooms as an option just I prefer some kind of auto system as default.

[@ElmntFire]

Going back to the moba examples, this is exactly how they handle normal queues. All the same rules as ranked matchmaking behind the scenes, but your team size isn't restricted and your MMR is completely hidden.

[@jpVari]

@@ElmntFire ah cool, that would work for me.

[@doofmoney3954]

3K subs?? Straight up criminal!

[@Ali-fs7ze]

Well this is a nice surprise.

[@EvanSmith0]

babe wake up new press button win video

[@omgcandy16Kimicari0]

Calling the season pass model the "traditional" pricing model for fighting games is just wrong. There's a big difference between the version update model that lasted until 2017 or so and the season pass model which now dominates the industry and we're all worse off for.

[@pressbuttonwin]

You're right-I should've said "standard" or "current" instead of "traditional." That being said, the version update model seems worse than the season pass model, so I'm surprised you prefer it!

[@Kreozot2D]

Free to play is a big question mark for me. Even low price games can suffer from cheating, and having 60 bucks base price puts a cheater at risk of potentially losing the access to the money invested. Also, one should remember that before having season passes with characters, pretty much before Street Fighter V, we all had to buy a new full price game for every new iteration, and it was for around 20 or 25 years. And this iteration not only was costly but also could divide the player base. Also, before that, on arcade each time one wanted to have one life at the game, they would need to insert a coin/token to continue. Being free to play will barely increase the player number by heavily modifying the monetization, very likely at the cost of player experience. Things that we had for free would be paywalled. And most of the fighting game player base would bounce back to playing their dota anyways, because of psychological advantage of playing in a team and sharing the victory/defeat. When base Street Fighter V was released on Playstation Plus, in Russian social network I was reading a long wall of comments for my amusement. Most of the comments were saying, and I am not kidding there, "This game is a pay to win microtransaction simulator". Those were people who never played Street Fighter V, got it for free, look at the character select screen where 50% of the roster was locked, and closed the game. None of them knew that Street Fighter V was the first and still IS the only fighting game where you can unlock the payed DLC characters by being good at the game and earning in-game currency. None of them knew that the lootboxes were introduced very late into the game and were avaliable with "fight money", only including pieces of cosmetics for the game. I am not saying that the current pricing or distribution is perfect, I am saying that it has it's advantages on quite a few levels while being still the best we had as FGC. I personally would like fighting games to have more content on release - more arenas, characters, single player modes and even unlockables (free cosmetics and arenas or their variations as a personal progress reward), and more QoL features (wifi indication, PC benchmark to determine the player performance, ability to blacklist players who are playing with 16F rollback in my regional lobby). Then I would gladly invest more money into the DLCs, trusting the developer/distributor for releasing a good game.

[@ThatFairyBoy]

The thing about the arcade monetization: the barrier to entry there is $0.25. Anyone who had a quarter could go and play at least a round. You didn't have to 1st own the console for multiple hundreds of dollars, plus a TV or monitor, and on top of that buy the game for $60 just to even *try* the game out. You just needed a quarter to get your foot in the door. As to a more modern monetization structure, even free-to-play games we define as 'successful' like League of Legends and Fortnite are plagued by reviews like what you describe in that Russian social network. But the fact remains that the lower barrier-to-entry means more people get to try the game and try firsthand what it's like to play. And once they get their foot in the door, the ultimate test of success comes down to the gameplay experience. League and Fortnite have stable networks and reliable gameplay, so unless your personal internet connection is trash you will be able to consistently have stable game connections, whereas SFV notoriously has poor netcode with a large and noticeable input delay, making the online experience not worth it to the people who play. That, I suspect, is the real reason it fails to reach the same level of success even at a post-launch free-to-play model. I think there is a successful model in which a fighting game can be free-to-play with good netcode AND have those quality of life and unlockable features you mention. I don't know where exactly that perfect balance is, but I'm sure studios could find it for themselves if they tried

[@Kreozot2D]

@@ThatFairyBoy I posted this video in my twitter and had a chat with my friend about f2p model of distribution in fighting games. The topic is a rabbit hole of discussion, and while I cannot afford the time right now, I would like to say that I am and likely will be against the free to play distribution of fighting games. 1 F2P is very attractive for cheaters 2 The current distribution is the best we had in the history 3 Even if FGs were f2p, the player count would be pretty much the same depending on a title, it's marketing and it's attractiveness to the player, because of some fundamental rules of fighting games. Most of the players will bounce from the game after losing a single match without even trying the tutorial. On the other hand, making the game f2p is a huge threat to it's quality. I can name only 2 f2p games that had a non-intrusive monetization, and therefore consider both of them exclusions to the general rule that free to play is the easiest way to ruin the game and a franchise. I won't accept the huge risk of having a bad free to play game for a slight chance of having slightly more low-midskill players who are barely interested in fighting games and hang out from time to time to collect the daily achievements and mash buttons. 4 Main point of the video is that it's author wants to hop into the fighting game any time of the day or night and get into the match with equally skilled player at the press of a button, like in mobas. This is simply impossible, not only because the fighting games are not a mainstream genre with less players, but also because in mobas and team based shooters there IS a difference in skill between team members, but it is less noticeable because it is evened out by the teamplay. If there is a strong player on the enemy team, you will probably notice their individual contribution to the match, but you will likely stand a chance against his team. While in fighting game in such scenario you always will have to face that single player who plays very well and will outplay you, 1 on 1. Of course this goes both ways. But there are tons of variables in these mainstream games, and as I said, it's a huge topic to discuss, and I already wrote too much. Respect.

[@ThatFairyBoy]

@@Kreozot2D @Kreozot @Kreozot I can understand skepticism and hesitancy to going f2p, because there really are a lot of games that do it poorly. And it is certainly possible that you are right and there is something about fighting games that will just make it impossible to work that way, but we can't know for sure until some of them actually try it. As for specifics that you mention, it sounds like you accept them as given facts, but I disagree. For instance, the notion that most people who jump into a match and lose first try will immediately drop the game forever is just disengenuous. Some certainly will, as with any game, but if difficulty and immediate failure were significant deterrents to gamers then we wouldn't see success of games like Elden Ring for instance, where there are several early points in the game that could be considered walls for the player but a large majority pushed through because the game itself was compelling, engaging, just fun. I don't think fighting games are fundamentally different. I see your point about team play, and having that soften the blow of losses and making it easier to push through challenges, knowing you have someone to work with. Multiplayer games are always more fun when you can do so with friends, and I think even though fighting games are 1v1 they are still made better with friends. Having a friend you can work with to train and problem solve, and spar against makes you a better player and makes the experience more tolerable. The fact that fighting games right now are full priced games makes it difficult for a lot of us to recruit our friends to join us, but at a f2p level that barrier drops to 'hey just download it and try it out with me, if you don't end up liking it then nothing wasted.' For cheating, yeah a lower barrier to entry means the same for cheaters as every other player, but that ultimately comes down to the developers to reliably patch exploits and offer real anti-cheat solutions, just like any paid game. I also play Dead by Daylight which has probably the worst cheater problems I've seen in any game, and the fact that it's a paid game doesn't matter because the cheaters can get the game codes from illicit sites for next to nothing anyway. Cheating only continues to be an issue because of the developers being slow to take actions to address it. As for better skill-based matchmaking, I mean yeah it is technically *impossible* to have someone of "equal" skill level, but lower barrier to entry = more players = more data points = better accuracy from the games skill rating = better chance to get matched to someone *close* to your skill level. And actually, it'll have an *easier* time because of the fact that it's 1v1, because it doesn't have to try to average out the skill ratings of all the teams' players for a match, it only has to look at the numbers of two people and pair them together. (location and ping are also a factor of course but that's the case in every online game anyway). Ultimately, it may not work, but I think it's worth a studio or two giving it an honest shot, and I am looking forward to seeing more about Project L as it develops and see if they apply a similar model to what they do for League. I appreciate your discussion!

[@nodnoh-2174]

So I listened to this and you made a huge reach speculating that SFV had more viewers that are not players when you only accounted for PC players. What kind of logic was that? For comparison, we know MK11 had a higher peak users than SFV on steam (27K) and sold 12M copies in a little over 2 years. That's like 400+ times as many people on console.

[@jdmhexagon2584]

Maybe SF6 will solve all these problems! (laughs sadly forever)

[@heardofrvb]

Wouldn't a free to play fighting game would eventually shut down, making it unplayable even on local?

[@pressbuttonwin]

Not necessarily; it would be up to the developer/publisher. Example of a game remaining playable: screenrant.com/evolve-servers-shut-down-2k-games/

[@greatestgamer00]

Im of the conspiracy that mobas numbers are fake . Ive yet to meet any one play that shit but plenty cod and ill die on that hill.

[@lastburning]

Hmm. I don't know any moba players either.

[@stonebbq5474]

The vast vast majority of league of legend's viewerbase comes from China. Last time they released viewership stats from Worlds, they said there were more than 73 million views, and only 4 million of them were NOT from China. Game is huge over there.

[@greatestgamer00]

@@stonebbq5474 well i do know china bans too manny games over their and they got nothing better than shit i phone and pc games. so you do be right on that. Big thanks for reminding me .

[@Qobp]

@@greatestgamer00 mobas have a large history there. From the old school days there were PC cafes with StarCraft/warcraft etc. Dota was made in Warcraft, and then eventually league came as a standalone game.

[@GamesAndAnimes]

Good points, I can only agree on every point.