Showing posts with label fighting game. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fighting game. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Fighting The Fighting Game Con

I know I'll likely catch flak from the fighting game community, and be passed over for future fighting game reviews, but what I'm about to share with you comes from a deep love, and understanding of a genre that has the potential to be good. Potential that is yet to be realized, because of greed.

Modern fighting games, for all intents and purposes, are a cash grab. Plain, and simple. Though the eSports venues, and competitive scene goers/participants would try and have you believe otherwise there is a reason no one else outside of the perceived viewership window is truly "getting good", and why we don't see new professionals coming into the spotlight as often as one would expect given the hype surrounding competitive gaming. The fighting games of today are ultimately, and purposefully being pitched at the most lucrative gaming crowd ever to grace the gaming industry purely for money sake. That gaming crowd being the casuals. Casual gamers have shown time, and time again they'll blindly follow games and gaming trends if they can look cool to their friends and audience. The keyword being "look". Developers, and publishers aren't dumb, and they fully realize what attracts gamers to the casual scene. They know it's a mixture of faux competition, bragging rights, and plenty of flash added in for extra special effect. What this means to developers is that they can develop, and shovel out incomplete games that simply look, and feel the part year after year with little effort put into the game's competitive infrastructure. They know they have the casuals conditioned to accept this same meaningless routine experience regardless of the lack of competitive value provided. That experience being a year long shelf life of the vanilla version, and other slightly upgraded releases down the line with a few new bits and baubles introduced to keep things fresh enough for casual consumer appeal.