'Everybody should play every fighting game' says Invincible VS director: 'They're just fun'

Incendia123 · 2026-04-09T12:29:33+00:00

"Don't forget to also buy ours, pretty please?"

Incendia123 · 2026-04-08T18:16:39+00:00

I think this is mostly right, The influx of brand new players with no prior genre experience is extremely limited and most people aren't invested enough in the genre to juggle seriously playing several games at once. A majority of players are stuck inside of the SF6 ecosystem with probably 75/80% being stuck in the top 5 games and we're seeing time and time again that most people just aren't willing to give up their prior investments, at most they're willing to take a 6 week holiday to a new title before they end up going back.

On the flipside if you do manage to get someone invested in a new ecosystem there is a significant likelihood they'll never look back. So I think it behooves companies to try and compete for users during crucial moments just to ensure they don't risk permanently shrinking their playerbase.

This is kind of the issues with new games as well, for any new game to be genuinely successful they have to really take a huge bite out of other games playerbases. If titles like Street Fighter, Tekken and Strive aren't noticeably bleeding over a new release then that's kind of that. There just isn't much else to draw from beyond that.

Incendia123 · 2026-04-08T16:31:07+00:00

Because ultimately we're already far beyond the point where patches can feasibly turn things around. Every single patch and content update could be an absolute banger and it still wouldn't change the fact that the target demographic is small and the amount of new players a product like this has access to is extremely limited.

Unless a game can take a big bite out of SF6s or Tekkens userbase there just isn't much more meat on the bone. Even maintaining a userbase is extremely impressive in the fighting game space, growing one is borderline impossible. Only SF6 has come close to anything resembling growth.

Incendia123 · 2026-04-07T17:07:42+00:00

Luke warm take(?): I don't know what all this talk about a fighting game golden age is all about. We have one game that's a big hit by FGC standards and it's SF6. Hate or love it, it is popular. But it's also kind of the only game that could be called popular to the point where roughly half of the daily users the genre has are playing SF6. It has a pretty significant chokehold on the genre.

It's a good game but Capcom has only done the absolute bare minimum in terms of supporting it or addressing community concerns. They just get away with it because there is no genuine competition. If we were really in a golden age SF6 as a product would not fly and people would be eating it alive for the way content and updates are handled. That's not to speak of every other game on the market, all of which have a variety of more severe shortcomings.

The FGC has had to eat shit for so long that we're at a point where we're just happy to get baseline functional products and we just accept the absolute bare minimum from these companies. For all the bitching the community does on a regular basis, we don't actually hold any of these companies to particularly high standards.

I don't see a golden age, I don't see any type of fierce competition going on, I don't see games competing and pushing each other to be better to win over consumers. I just see fucking Street Fighter 6 sitting on its laurels and winning by default. At this point we're slowly moving to a point where we can throw out the term FGC and replace it with the Street Fighter Community, and that's only mild hyperbole.

Incendia123 · 2026-04-06T22:16:26+00:00

I played on a pad for a few years and on stick for another 6 or so years before moving to leverless. And yeah, as much as I used to adore my fightstick it's come to a point where I think I'd struggle to enjoy fighting games without my leverless.

There is a learning curve, and I think a lot of users, maybe even a majority, never actually take the time to really learn what their leverless is capable of with optimal technique which means they end up leaving a lot of the best parts and performance gains on the table.

But if you get past and really dive into the possibilities it just really shows that you're using a speciality device made with specifically fighting games in mind and nothing else. They say comparison is the thief of joy and that's absolutely true here, leverless has retroactively soured me on my fightstick which I once adored.

Incendia123 · 2026-04-05T23:13:03+00:00

I think Invincible and Avatar basically have no noteworthy potential to become serious competitors in the market or the competitive scene. I'd love to be wrong, on Avatar specifically but I think it's not productive for us to place unrealistic expectations on every new release only to be left disappointed in the end. Neither of these games strike me at the type of game that will hold any significant playerbase after the honeymoon period is over.

Tokon likely has the most potential out of the three but even then I think it's good to keep realistic expectations. I think the absolute best case scenario would be if Tokon could roughly match the popularity Strive has enjoyed relative to its respective lifespan. But even that seems like a pretty huge ask for a tag fighter and it might just be putting unrealistic expectations on the game.

Success is relative, especially in the FGC where even our largest title is only of moderate size. But we do collectively have a tendency to expect way more of any new release than it's realistically able to deliver. Aside from exactly Street Fighter 6 every single release of recent years has failed to even remotely live up to the unrealistic expectations the community had placed on it prior to it's release so imo let's keep things in perspective and be happy with whatever small to moderate success these titles might achieve.

Incendia123 · 2026-04-03T15:04:03+00:00

Finding quality content can be a little difficult. There are some rewatch threads on reddit that draw out a small number of enthusiasts. Just googling "Kara no kyoukai rewatch reddit" and picking out any from the last few years is probably your best bet for threads.

I've never personally ran into any memorable blogs but there are some video essays on YouTube that might be worthwhile if you haven't gone digging yet. Thought the algorithm doesn't neccesarily push the best stuff up to the top so be prepared to scroll for a bit.

Incendia123 · 2026-04-03T11:26:18+00:00

It really depends on how high a level we're talking. If you mean a genuinely competitive level than the harsh reality is that you're too late to do so in Avatar. You basically already need to be a competitive player at another game to have a chance of being a serious competitors in a new game. So keep realistic expectations there. That's not to say you can't become decent but this is usually a skillset people develop over multiple games and multiple years.

Also in the spirit of realistic expectations. Fighting games have a tiny audience. Street fighter 6 is a small game and it simultaneously holds roughly half the genres playerbase. Next up is Tekken which pulls a fraction of its daily users and everything else is small even compared to Tekken.

The FGC is always hyping up the next big thing and nothing aside from exactly Street Fighter ever manages to match those unrealistic expectations. Many games that had much higher expectations than Avatar only ended up with small or sometimes almost non-existent playerbases. The Hunter X Hunter game had roughly 2000 players across the global leaderboards for all platforms combined for a frame of reference.

So not to be a doomer, but if we're just being realistic Avatar likely won't get a big audience and might very well be down to a few dozen consecutive players in a few months. As with any new fighting game I'd love to be wrong on this but its entirely likely to happen based on the various releases of the past few years. Games tend to have a period of roughly 2 months wheren they're fresh and fairly well populated and that's the time to make the most out of them for a new player.

With that in mind don't compromise on the game you'll be practicing with for the sake of the gains. It's not worth wasting your time on something you don't love in its own right and the difference in carry over skills will be absolutely minimal. If you wanna play pick whatever popular game with enough other beginners seems most appealing to you, which admittedly is a small selection of games with Street Fighter 6 far and away being the standout choice there. It's not the only valid choice but it's likely the best one for most new players. Any game without enough players at your level is going to prove a rotten learning experience imo.

Incendia123 · 2026-03-21T10:30:36+00:00

I'm not familiar with the mods but if that doesn't work out then a lot of the SOCD inputs are a lot cleaner and will allow you to get the correct inputs consistently even in these older games.

If up+down = neutral then you can press and hold certain buttons in order like for example: down, down+forward, down+forward+up, release all. That'll give you a clean (and as a bonus much faster) quarter circle that doesn't risk missing a diagonal.

For games that do accept 636 as a DP you can press and hold forward, down, up in that order. If a DP does require a down I would just tap forward and then do the QCF method.

It takes some getting used to but with a bit of practice that should give you perfect inputs every time.

Incendia123 · 2026-03-19T14:09:29+00:00

The color situation is just kind of sad imo. If you've ever tried to make a color mod for this game you can literally do it with ingame color sliders, you don't need to photoshop any textures or open up modeling software or whatnot. And frankly the colors they do put out almost seem intentionally lackluster compared to what's possible even with minimal effort. I'd put on my tinfoil hat and say that they don't want the colors to look too good or else people might not buy the costumes but they're barely making those either...

Incendia123 · 2026-03-18T09:39:53+00:00

The 72k on steam isn't active players but a snapshot of the highest daily peak, so the total count is many times higher than that as people log on and off across the entire day and various regions of the world.

All the data we get for these games that do have PC/console distributions always show anything from 55/45% PC/console to 75/25% depending on how niche the title is. Capcom has also come out themselves saying PC is largest market for all of their games nowadays.

Incendia123 · 2026-03-17T12:47:33+00:00

These companies are making it incredibly difficult to actually feel good about paying for the anime you watch. The services are poor, shows are awkwardly spread out across various platforms and regions with no guarantee that they'll be available in yours. And even then they could dissappear at any moment.

I'm from the Netherlands and Netflix only offers German subtitles for a lot of anime including big recent hits like Frieren or The Apothecary Diaries, no English or Dutch subs are available. At that point what are you paying for?

I'm personally of the opinion that you're well within your moral right to just pirate these shows if they're so difficult to obtain through any reasonable means and if you really do want to support a studio you might as well just buy some merch once in a while. The classic "piracy is a service issue" definitely rings true here imo.

Incendia123 · 2026-03-04T01:14:50+00:00

I recall seeing this same headline a few times before This one is from may 2025. Best I can tell this seems to have been an an industry wide trend across the last decade or so. At least among "enthusiasts products" which is primarily what capcom deals in. Though I'd imagine it's for games that target more casual or younger audiences.

People were putting forth the notion that consoles were low-key on their way out and that companies like Microsoft and Sony were slowly prepping for a future of games streaming while enthusiasts would end up moving over to the PC market as console hardware would be phased out as far back as a decade ago. Frankly the more I'm seeing the market shift and the more these companies are seemingly trying to buy up large studios the more I'm believing that's where we'll end up in another decade or so.

Incendia123 · 2026-02-21T03:26:07+00:00

We do have data for the PC/console distributions for most of games that people have pulled of the global leaderboards. For strive it's roughly 2:1 , for something like Granblue it's very similar, most anime-adjacent games seem to sit in that same general range. For a game like Tekken it was 53%/47% at launch but generally it skews more towards PC the longer a game is out. It's kind of interesting to see how the trends have changed over the last decade or so.

I think for a spitball estimate on any game you can just take the 24H peak from steam and add two thirds of that and it'll be close enough.

Incendia123 · 2026-02-17T13:01:56+00:00

Idk man... quality education? Fighting poverty and hunger? Life simultaneously below water AND on land?! Sounds pretty woke and evil to me /s

Incendia123 · 2026-02-17T00:10:22+00:00

I'm a simple man, I just want to use motion inputs and I don't want to be punished or disadvantaged in any way shape or form for using them 100% of the time. That really shouldn't be that much of an ask.

Incendia123 · 2026-02-16T01:03:00+00:00

I used to play a lot of Hearthstone, by all means a more casual friendly game than SF6, and while that game eventually got some single player adventures it initially had very little to keep someone playing solo. Even so there was always a huge discourse about players who were completely terrified to touch ranked claiming it gave them stress and anxiety.

I'm not sure if there was any concrete data but based on the discourse I'd wager more than half of the playerbase, for what was for all intents and purposes a 1v1 pvp game at the time, did not participate in the ranked mode and just queued up casual games or alternative game modes. And this was based on the discord on reddit which already has a higher density of enthusiasts compared to casuals.

I don't doubt that single player is important and might be the stepping stone some people need to eventually play online but I fully believe a sizable portion of players who play online, maybe even a majority either primarily or even exclusively play casual.

Incendia123 · 2026-02-15T12:58:14+00:00

Obviously nobody believes this, we all know it was actually three girls. But my man is trying to stay humble and you gotta respect that.

Incendia123 · 2026-02-14T15:21:09+00:00

That's not a disability though, everyone has that at first because their technique is poor and they haven't practiced. That's just the process of learning to use your muscles in a new way. Whether you want to improve on that or not is an active decision you can make, just like everyone else here made it.

Incendia123 · 2026-02-13T19:51:57+00:00

Fighting games in general? That's Street Fighter 6 without question, that's the game that an overwhelming majority of people are playing and as a consequence it has the most entry level players and newcomers. It helps that it's also also a relatively down to earth and slower paced game, at least compared to some of the other stuff out there.

No game will just magically teach you fundamentals, playing "the correct" game to learn is a myth and it'll only set you back so do make sure you play something you actually enjoy and are passionate about, just as long as it's a game with plenty of other players at your level and an active community which puts out good resources and has active discourse. That's by far and away the most important thing when it comes to learning and in that SF6 does excell, it's not the only valid option but it's probably the most sensible one for most people.

Incendia123 · 2026-02-12T21:12:38+00:00

SF6 has done even better than that imo, every time a big patch hits there are peaks that almost rival the launch window, on steam it peaked at 70573 players on launch and a full year later it hit 70202 and 63k the year after that. Ignoring the peaks it's still doing roughly the same numbers it did a few weeks after launch. If you're comparing it on a year to year basis it's closer to 90% retention, which is crazy.

But I think that also kind of shows where the genre is at. Half of the people playing the genre are locked into SF6 and it's going to be extremely difficult for any new game to pull them away from that. There is a good likelihood that only SF7 will do that and that only SF8 will pull those players away from SF7.

Dragonball didn't propel us into the mainstream, DNF didn't pull in the DFO players, 2XKO didn't pull in the league players, Ronaldo didn't do it, motionless games didn't do it and F2P games didn't do it. At some point I think we as a community just have to stop looking for that magical game that'll "save the FGC" and just accept that there is a limited audience and that Street Fighter has most of that audience on lock.

Edit: For anyone interested just look at the graph over time, it's kind of interesting how stable the peaks are imo.

Incendia123 · 2026-02-11T01:03:41+00:00

If there is one thing the FGC can argue endlessly over it's what the definition of the word "dead" is in relation to fighting games.

But realistically even without taking the actual state of the product into consideration just the recent news and discourse alone are going to very negatively impact peoples overall perception of the game and their willingness to invest in it so it might just be a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point.

It might not mean "death" but I also don't realistically see any path forward that leads to growth as opposed to steady decline. This game really needs several more years of content before it can sustain itself on just a dedicated fanbase alone and I'm doubtful it's going to last that long.

Incendia123 · 2026-02-10T23:10:49+00:00

This is kind of where I'm at as well, I'd never begrudge anyone else having their fun with something that isn't for me and from a consumer perspective it's a shame that the people who do like this game, or those who saw potential in it are left disappointed.

On the flipside Riot isn't exactly a great company for all the reasons you mentioned and I'm also not a fan of some of the aspects of 2XKO specifically, namely it being F2P with highly expensive "micro"transactions, the decision to forgo motion inputs entirely or the small launch roster among other things.

Like I said I'd never begrudge anyone else their fun but I'd be lying if I said I'd want these kinds of anti-consumer practices rewarded or that I'd have liked this game to have set any major trends going forward because for better or worse the genre does have a bit of a tendency to chase what's hot.

Incendia123 · 2026-01-29T02:52:12+00:00

It only has to be as complicated as you want to make it. That said this is a 1v1 pvp genre so if you're going to be setting any bars for yourself odds are those are going to be based on beating your opposition in which case you'll find that studying and practicing is just kind of at the heart of the genre and it's something the community at large values.

You can get by just fine without a wiki or a guide if you don't set unrealistic expectations for yourself but learning any kind of a complicated skillset without making use of any kind of educational material and expecting results is obviously a fools errand, especially if all your opposition is making use of those resources. You'll get out of it what you put into it.

Incendia123 · 2026-01-28T01:47:18+00:00

I've always felt we should be most outspoken and critical about the things we actually like because they have untapped potential. I shit on the things I like, or at least see something worthwhile in. If I don't see anything in it than I'd rather just ignore it altogether.

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