People are already seething over this turd. I don't feel bad for anyone who got laid off (they were lucky to have jobs for 9 years).
This should be a case study for what you're not supposed to do as a developer when a billion dollar company gives you lots of money and time to make a game for them.
Ah, yes. The Pokemon problem. Pokemon has been doing the same, exact thing for like 30 years now, it still attracts kids, and it has retained a lot of it's grown up fanbase. Quality's taking a nosedive but nobody seems to care. Still a massive success. Dirt cheap to make. Runs on a potato. If you know what you are doing you can very easily set up sweeps on the opponent that are very difficult to counter. It lets you be good and flex your knowledge. It lets you create a power gap.
Yet despite the 12 million sales, Pokemon ZA is still one of the worst selling Pokemon games below Arceus and BDSP, and Pokopia was struggling to get sales. Eventually people will get sick of the slop.
Meanwhile fighting games are on this mad dash to make themselves wheelchair accessible and to allow anyone to do 50% HP super long combos and the FGC that has been at it for 30 years just really isn't having it, AND Lil' Jimmy is still glued to Fortnite, because you can melee fight AND shoot guns AND drive cars in Fortnite, so that is just cooler. Graphics are getting better and better for no particular reason and it's often harder to parse what the fuck is going on now than it was 20 years ago because everything is overdesigned. Bad players can hang easier but it's not like they can reach the upper echelons anyway, so no one's happy. There is no power gap. Every character can twoshot. So it no longer feels special when someone does. Everyone can comeback with meter+rage too. We took the hype out, replaced it with participation awards.
Well I for one am flabbergasted at this development. One button fighting game where you just rape shit from fullscreen with Teemo and no counterplay flops? Whoa, man. Insane outcome.
Only 30-40 something year-old millenials in SoCal and tourists milking the "wheelchair accessibility" in fighting games/the fgc are playing fighting games nowadays (vtumors, internet celebs, far leftists, trannies, young "esport pros" who will move to other scenes). Fighting games and the developers kept relying on nostalgia, but it's not working like it used to. Not even the endless CoTW ads in last year's Wrestlemania made people want to play shitty CoTW, Fortnite adds content kids and manchildren will consume. Fighting Games give you less, and demand you buy day-one disc-locked content containing frame data and characters you had access to in older games.
You didn't add the character who's literally a fucking street fighter to your fighting game.
Eat shit and die, how are you this retarded.
Not only that, but they were also stupid enough to make a roster based off Arcane, a very divisive show (Arcane was super woke). Also, who the fuck likes Illaoi?! Nobody likes her, and she felt like a DEI choice (We could have had Sivir, Katarina, Vayne, etc). Then they tripled down on the stupidity by not only giving you a small roster, but also less characters to use on release (better open your wallet or grind wins if you want to use everybody). This game could have been a cash cow, and the devs blew it.
The FGC loves it, friend. They love retarded queers in wheelchairs playing fighting games, they make a point of celebrating their they/thems and Sonicfoxes and whatever the fuck Hungrybox has that makes him act like Hungrybox.
The issue is that the FGC is an astroturfing platform for Capcom and not an actual organic community or representative of what actual human beings want from their video games. Thus developers are getting very strange feedback when they design a game with the FGC in mind.
Thats because the FGC Has been dead for a decade. The organizers saw money and kicked all the fun out.
Fighting game devs have been pandering Esports, the SoCal FGC, woke lefties, and Max/Justin Wong/Knee/Sonic Fox for years. Now the chickens are coming home to roost because nobody wants to play today's fighting games.