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Fighting games in 2026 are floundering, with everything not called Street Fighter 6 relegated to the trash bin of history.
You lost me on the first sentence. Are we pretending Guilty Gear didn’t just go from being an extremely niche IP to a household name last generation? While there are issues worth talking about, fighting games have been steadily growing year-over-year with no sign of slowing down.
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Yeah, it’s an article that makes you think it cites its sources and did its homework, but it doesn’t even examine why SF2’s success is so high, like that arcade revenue in the 90s is basically a cheat code compared to selling copies of console games, or that SF2 had a number of versions across that entire decade that all factor into that several billion dollars it earned. What the article refers to as “the dark ages” is actually a different era than what most would assign to the moniker to, misnomer though it might be. And it also states things as facts that aren’t; not just your Guilty Gear example but that somehow SF6 is the most homogenized SF game somehow. This feels like the author is just salty that they don’t care for the last few years’ offerings personally.
As someone who doesn’t pay attention to niche fighting games: Guilty Gear games are still being made? I thought they were a retro game or something. I think you’re overestimating it’s prominence. The only moden fighting games that come to mind as someone who has no interest in competitve play are Street Fighter, Mortal Combat (and Injustice), Smash Bros, and 2XKO. I’m don’t have confidence to say that fighting games aren’t growing, but the only news/attention I’ve seen for the genre since the launch of Street Fighter 6 has been a couple 2XKO trailers.
Guilty Gear Strive is a really fucking good fighting game
Guilty Gear is now a multi-million seller when every previous game didn’t even crack a tenth of that. Yes, what they did to Guilty Gear demonstrably worked. Tekken and Dragon Ball FighterZ are both huge. If I were a betting man, I’d say Marvel Tokon will do about as well as any of the other most successful fighting games out there.
Who cares lol
Games are about having fun, not market potential or whatever.
This. It’s not a problem, it’s a niche.
As an outsider the reason i domt bother with these is you have to know every damn iframe and move flow timing perfectly to even know what the game is.
Theres one point in this article about a practice mode thats totally wrong. Aint no one ever gonna use that, especially a newbie. Then a later one saying single player should teach you this stuff. This is right.
Reimagining these games as a 2d souls like would be incredible, they do teach the mechanics across the game. But then, those games have loot and xp to soften the harsh reality of the skill ceiling. Would fighting games lovers accept that? I think no.
The problem with these games is ranked online multiplayer. Back in the arcade days no one knew the damn frame timings. People just played and had a good time with each other in person. Console ports brought that experience home so you could enjoy it with friends and family, without needing a roll of quarters. No one had any issues with anxiety over these games because you were just hanging out with friends playing a game together. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost. If your brother’s Ryu was too good, you just challenged him to beat you with a different character.
Online ranked play takes all that away. It makes the competition serious even if you don’t want it to be. Now you’re always being matched up against an equally skilled opponent playing their best character. You never feel like you’re making progress because every match is tough as nails. For people who thrive on competition, that’s great. For everyone else it really sucks!
This is legit. I remember playing Soul Calibur 3 I think on PS2 pretty regularly with a couple of friends. One of them owned the game and would stomp us until I asked to borrow it for a while so the other two of us could get good. A few weeks later I was doing bomb and air grab loops with Taki and we were pretty evenly matched, while other friends who would play occasionally were pretty easy to beat. There was no big competitive online play, we got better by figuring out how to counter each other because we had similar amounts of experience with the game.
I’m not sure how you replicate that experience with randos.
You can replicate that with ranked, because you match people of similar skill levels. SF6 has you go from rookie to diamond which is matched with people of similar skill levels, usually within ±1 rank so a gold 2 Vs a gold 3. Then when you get to diamond there is a small chance to match against a Master rank and you get higher reward for beating them(up to 250lp). Then when you have climbed to the top of Diamond 5, you move to master rank. In Master you then switch to a proper elo system.
This removes the vast majority of people getting absolutely stomped on by people who have 1000+ hours when you have 10. You still have to put in time and effort if you want to get better like you did as a kid, but you’re more likely to get fun and closer matches.
I don’t really play fighting games anymore but previous titles like SF Ex+Alpha had a killer training mode which scratched my completionist itch. There were scores and gates and progressions, though I can’t recall if you got anything like XP (in truth that bares no relevance to a fighting game anyway).
As an outsider the reason i domt bother with these is you have to know every damn iframe and move flow timing perfectly to even know what the game is.
No you don’t. There are very few moves I remember exact numbers for. I know my fastest button, I know what’s unsafe on block, and that’s really all that’s needed. And it’s something that can easily be learned by feel too.
Wikis exist as a reference point, but no one is expected to memorize them.
You dont need to know iframes or combos. I do ok on Tekken online not knowing a single combo or any frame data. I just play my game jabbin and kickin duckin and dodging and sometimes i win sometimes i lose. Its fun. The only part I hate about online is fucking Brazil MFers with connection so bad we have to play the entire fight at 5fps.
And that’s fine, not every game has to be for everyone.
It can be a problem if the company is trying to bring in and maintain new users, which is kinda why the article was made. 2XKO laid off most of their team and scaled back development because it wasn’t successful. It’s also hurting indies like Rivals of Aether 2 which seems to be doing OK but not as good as the first game.
That’s a problem with the industry and economics that don’t allow for a variety of creative expression, not with the game genre.
I honestly don’t see how single player “content” could be of any help. Sure, situational training like Strive and a few other games have (UNI I think had it?) would be nice to have, but I think the main obstacle for a lot of players is the (gameplay) interaction with another real person. I can’t say how other genres fix this (or if they even do), but my guess is that the mechanics themselves are less restrictive and a bit more forgiving.
Also, personally, I prefer buying characters for relatively cheap rather than having the usual f2p predatory crap. They should obviously be free for training tho.
The idea of buying characters is itself wild. Games as a service has really screwed up player expectations.
Games that are intended to be long-term projects with big updates and expansions over time have to monetize those expansions somehow. Character DLC still feels like the most equitable way to do it, I’d rather periodically toss a few bucks at actual content than be milked for empty calorie gacha, battle passes, FOMO rotating shops, or whatever else actual live service games are doing these days to try and exploit whales.
I dont know, we have more MK games in the last 6-7 than the previous and they all had dlc. Best MK had great konquest and no dlc.
I mean… I’m not saying it’s good, but considering most games wouldn’t get free characters as updates (I think only MBTL did it, and it’s probably because most of the free characters are from Fate), I think it’s better to be able to optionally buy a set of characters if you want to play them, instead of having to buy a whole new version of the game to continue playing.
Updates suck. Gaming was better when they didn’t exist.
This is a woefully bad take. The best fighting games got to where they are after a lot of iteration and refinement. The final version of Skullgirls is my favorite game of all time, but 1.0 was straight up broken.
Do you know how many Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games we had in the 90s?
Before the current era of endless updates, games had to be ready to go when they shipped. If it was broken, they’d delay and fix the worst issues. Early iterations of a series tended to be a little more feature-light than later iterations, but that’s how you ended up with multiple installments per decade.
Compare this with the modern model where it’s half expected that games will be broken on release and it’s all but unheard of to get a sequel within a few years.
Having lived in both environments, the old system had way better results. Without it we wouldn’t have some of the well developed genres we do today.
Imagine if instead of making piles of DLC and remasters Bethesda had just started working on Elder Scrolls VI right after Skyrim. We’d probably be on like VIII by now. Instead they went from horse armor to rereleasing everything they’ve ever made, with a shitty MMO in between.
The article acknowledges the fact that the most fondly remembered singleplayer modes are the ones with unique twists… then proceeds to write off everyone asking to see more of that.
Singleplayer can never be a substitute for a human opponent. CPUs are just never going to play the way humans do, and they’re never going to adequately prepare you for them.
But that’s precisely why people loved the modes that didn’t try to take it seriously and instead offered something unusual and different. Lean into things singleplayer can do well, instead of trying to chase after things it can’t.
After playing Arc Raiders, I kind of wonder if the newer generation of AI could put together a challenge that actually fits the holy grail of fighting Game singleplayer.
An AI could be given a special avatar that challenges a particular theme of the player’s development, being strong in some regards but not in others. Think one enemy that’s a crawling ninja with super fast movement, another who’s a crawling hulk with high-range attacks.
The AI could also be guided by metrics of how fast its opponents learn mechanics or how much they enjoy the match, rather than “how do I beat this player”. I’d feel safe thinking a predictable AI would not be judged well.
EDIT: I honestly do get the knee jerk downvotes regarding AI, given everything it means in recent years. But let’s not forget it also refers to computer opponents in video games (which admittedly may see advances due to current mostly-icky tech)
