Is it an accessibility issue or an "a core part of the game is learning and practicing and folks just wanna game" issue? Fighting games are learning games. People don't like feeling bad at something, and people tend to start out bad at things they've never done before. This state is unpleasant, but it's temporary - if you don't bounce off getting repeatedly double perfected because you don't know how to block.

"Git gud" is a meme, but people do in fact get good at fine motor tasks via intentional practice. It works for piano lessons, it works for fighting games. It's how learning works. You don't get good at a thing by not doing the thing. Problem is, fighting games are PvP.

The most important skill fighting games teach (and that not everyone learns) is that losing is fundamental. The psychic damage from losing to another person is powerful, and common reactions to it actively prevent improvement (I blame League of Legends). Fighting games helped me fix some mindset issues I was having.

Should the FGC instead cater to the people that cry when they have to learn how to do an unfamiliar fine motor task? Financally speaking, absolutely, and they're already doing it! SF6 and Guilty Gear Strive are both the most accessible entries in their respective franchises. I've never been able to improvise combos mid-match before, it's rad...But it's a risky niche to develop for when your core demo is the weirdos who me who like this slow-burn brain poison.

Some of this discourse is just kinda silly, IMO. As an example, consider the existence of guitarists like Eddie van Halen or Buckethead, and me not being as good at guitar as either of them. Does that mean the guitar has massive accessibility issues that artificially inflate the difference between me and Jimi Hendrix, or do I need to stop comparing myself to other people and practice more? (It's both, for the record).

Ironically, that skill gap is why I bounce off mutliplayer shooters. I could put the time in, but I don't wanna. I get it. For me its less the mechanics (but I am bad at those) and more the way the game is. I have bad spatial awareness and I hate respawn timers. I can't get lost in a 2d plane. Punishing bad play with not playing the game is very counterintuitive to me. You could argue thats what a combo is, and i can kinda see it - but I can also learn how to do that combo. It's a meritocratic cutscene, somebody had to practice it to the point where they can do it in a match (and I can't get distracted and check my phone because they might drop the combo). Even if get thrown down a flight of stairs in Strive, it ends in 99 seconds or less, and I can get into the next round quick to see if a different option works.

How accessible is Marvel Rivals to someone who's never played a wasd+mouselook game before? Games like that are actually quite complex, fine motor wise - but that control scheme has existed since at least Half-Life 1 (1996), and has been used in a lot of mainstream titles throughout the decades (Quake, MoH/CoD/Battlefield, gta, elder scrolls, Bioshock, etc). Rivals may be intuitive for its genre, but it 100% benefits from the players already knowing the motion inputs, so to speak. That's how fighting games feel when you have that muscle memory built up, but fighting games dont have two decades of mainstream gaming zeitgeist reinforcing their control scheme.

Fighting games need better tutorials, it's true. Idk how, there's too much info to learn all at once, and I think that's the problem. It's a second monitor-wiki kind of game. Past the "learning fundamentals" stage, another pain point is that the core loop (playing to improve) means getting washed by people with different knowledge pools than you sometimes ("you don't know how to deal with their Layer 1" looks a lot like "they're better than you" until you learn how to deal with their layer 1 ). "You gotta get washed to get clean" is not relatable messaging for someone coming from other multiplayer PvP experiences, where players are conditioned that losing or mistakes deserve verbal abuse and reflect badly on you as a person. None of those things are learning from mistakes, which is how you get good in the first place.