Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat “RUINED” fighting games? | The worst year and the secret to success

In 1995, EGM chose fighting games as the main genre in a downward trend due to the large number of games released in its shopping guide for consumers. Fighting games really came very close to bankruptcy, only it wasn't in the late 90s, but in 2011. The fighting game scene changed when Street Fighter 4 was launched in arcades in 2008 bringing together past, present and future by joining nostalgia, quality and investment in the competitive. More than 3 million copies have been sold. Tekken 5 took 5 years to reach those numbers. This spawned thousands or perhaps millions of new fighting game players. With that, other fighting games started to sell as well, like Bandai Namco, which had only fighting games on top of the bestsellers, surpassing Dragon Ball and One Piece. So companies started investing, for example Capcom while making versions of Street Fighter IV, working on Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Street Fighter vs. Tekken, SNK hired employees to advance The King of Fighters XIII, Namco Bandai started Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Soul Calibur 5 and Tekken vs. Street Fighter, Ed Boon started motion captures for Mortal Kombat and CyberConnect ran with Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2, in addition to dozens of other projects. They ended up being released at about the same time. MvC3 sold 2 million copies. Days later EA's Final Night Champion, Square Enix's Dissidia Final Fantasy and Ubisoft's Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs 3D were released. On April 19 Arc System released Arcana Heart 3 and Netherrealms launched Mortal Kombat 9. More than 10 fighting games were released as of May 2011 The biggest disaster was the Great Earthquake of eastern Japan with a magnitude of 9.1 on the Richter scale followed by a 40-meter-high tsunami that swept across parts of the country, responsible for the country's energy crisis due to the collapse of the Fukushima plant. This stopped the market, the studios and Japan. The second semester started only with re-releases and cell phone games, but it returned as it was before: on November 22, 4 fighting games came out on the same day: two WWE games, the Tekken Hybrid package and The King of Fighters XIII for consoles. In total in 2011 alone, between updates, games and DLCs, more than 20 new features were released for fighting game players. In 2012 there were still many games to be released, so many accumulated disappointments, either with negative publicity through disk DLCs and the like, or in sales, with emphasis on the failures Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Street Fighter x Tekken and Dead or Alive 5 which sold only about half of the target set by Toei Tecmo. Only smaller games, which were cheaper, were selling continuously. The market simply saturated, according to Capcom itself, who said what was happening in the fighting game scene was "(...) cannibalism, due to the large number of other games of the genre that were released in a short time". In 2011 Mortal Kombat 9 added the formula for casual audience marketing. In the past Soul Calibur had already called up Yoda and Darth Vader from Star Wars to sell, so Warner launched the paid DLC Freddie Kruger from Elm Street, along with other characters and skins and called it Season Pass, something unprecedented in the genre. Bandai Namco and Toei Tecmo tried other forms of release as a free game with no content, forcing the player to buy things in-game and making it more expensive than a full price game, but the Mortal Kombat formula was ready: moderate investment, famous characters from pop culture, big competitive championships and continuous release of season pass for years instead of new games. Those who followed the complete formula sold at least 5 million copies. Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter radically changed the history of fighting games, repeating what they had already done there at the beginning of it. As a result, new companies are returning or starting to invest in fighting games and between the second half of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 more than a dozen new fighting games are expected to be launched. And seeing what happened in 2011, I ask you: are we seeing a third wave of fighting games now or a new collapse of the genre? Timestamp 00:00 introduction 1:51 warnings 3:32 Street Fighter 5:59 Impact on industry 7:49 The first semester 9:47 The disaster 11:04 The second semester 12:48 The following year and the official announcement 14:25 Mortal Kombat 15:57 Magic formula for profitable fighting games 16:43 Current fighting games and the future 18:01 Like, share and subscribe The Segredos dos Games channel has the mission of bringing unpublished or rare content about the best and most top games in the world. Telling the stories of the games and their development behind the scenes. Thank you so much for watching. It's very important to me. I am Renato Cavallera and my challenge is to surprise you, and I will not rest until I do! Buenas! Don't forget to like, subscribe and click on the option ALL in the bell.