Why Did Street Fighter V Flop? An Analysis.
Street Fighter V has pretty firmly flopped, at this point. Capcom shipped 1.4 million copies since launch. And since that’s shipped, that means actual sales are probably lower. Which is like, not apocalyptically low, but is pretty goddamn close.
The question then is ‘why did SFV fail?’
There are a few reasons that I think are most likely so here they are;
One - Nobody Likes Capcom Anymore
Capcom, while not as shitty as they were a few years back, are still not particularly well loved by most consumers. DmC burned a lot of good will. Most people didn’t like Resident Evil 6. People are still sore over Ultimate Marvel 3 hitting less than a year after vanilla Marvel 3 did. Megaman’s mistreatment combined with the cancellation of Megaman Legends 3 still frosts a lot of asses. And then there’s stuff like Umbrella Corps which is just bad, and their exploitation of brands they don’t make games for via pachinko.
This can’t have helped. Capcom didn’t have any good will with a lot of people.
Two - Everyone is sick of Capcom’s Iterative Bullshit
This kind of goes back to point one but Capcom’s treatment of SF4 last gen was bad and probably seriously hurt SFV. Nobody liked Capcom’s 'oh, DLC is unpopular in Japan please buy the entire game again" bullshit, especially when they did it twice with SSF4 and Arcade Edition. And then Ultimate Marvel 3. It split the game hard, and since each iteration sold less than the last it’s pretty obvious it was popular with nobody. I’m willing to bet a lot of people held back on buying SFV cause they’re waiting for 'Super Street Fighter 5’ or whatever. Or again, just cause they’re pissed at Capcom.
Each new iteration of SF4 made the last completely obsolete. While it wasn’t literally Capcom coming and slapping the game out of your hands, considering each old version immediately, completely died it was pretty goddamn close. To have played SF4 the entire previous gen you’d need to have spent 200 dollars.
Not a lot to explain here. For a game Capcom wanted to be a major title they supported for the entire PS4’s lifespan, they sure as fuck didn’t market it. That had to have hurt it.
Four - Capcom Refuses To Accept Market Changes
Fighting games are different now, and Capcom doesn’t seem to get that.
I don’t mean mechanically, I mean in terms of what you get on the disk.
MK9 and Injustice set the standard for fairly meaty, lengthy story modes. Even games like Under Night In Birth and Blazblue have extensive VN-style story modes. Tekken 7 is going to have a story similar to Injustice. Guilty Gear too.
Most of these games have fairly in depth tutorial modes, excellent lobby systems, and more. Fuck, Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator probably has more bells and whistles (and the best tutorial) than any fighting game ever made.
SFV lacked all this shit at launch. SFV launched in a literally incomplete state. And when they DID launch SFV’s 'story mode’, well… I’m not gonna call it 'shit’ but it might as well have been subtitled 'Street Fighter V Story Mode: The Obligation.“
It was just a fighting game with local and online multiplayer and that isn’t enough to sell the game to anyone but the franchise’s hardcore fans anymore.
I know that’s a subjective complaint, but I really think how fucking outright ugly the game is hurt it at least some.
People like cool things. If they have to pick between two (otherwise equivilent) things and one looks cool and another looks like shit pretty much everyone is going to pick the one that looks cool. MKX looks cool. Guilty Gear Xrd looks cool. Tekken 7 looks cool. Fuck, even Pokken looks cool.
SFV looks like a play-doh tie-in. That didn’t help.
Six - Too few characters.
I know characters are expensive to make, hard to balance, each new character is a big addition, blah blah de blah blah, I know. I know how fighting games work.
But that doesn’t matter to casual consumers. Casual consumers like a lot of characters.
SF4 had 25 characters at launch.
Marvel vs Capcom 3 had like, 40.
MKX had 24 at launch and they all had multiple variants.
Fuck, even GG Xrd had SEVENTEEN.
I don’t think any single one of these caused the trainwreck that SFV is saleswide, but all of them together probably caused a pile-up that fucked the game over hard.
Capcom should have waited until all the characters and the story mode were done, and actually marketed the fucking game. And they definitely should have made it ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that if you buy the game you never ever have to buy a ‘new’ version, just DLC.
