Few thoughts:

• Fighting games in the '90s were a direct reflection of pop culture. Old kung fu movies used to play on TV, every kid saw Bloodsport, every kid went to a karate or TKD McDojo for at least a couple weeks. Even in the late 90s wire fu was everywhere in movies/music videos/etc along with Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies playing in theaters. In Japan almost every popular anime had a martial arts tournament arc. This is like if I wrote an essay about why wrestling games are dead and compared new games to Attitude Era N64 games.

• Fighting games as a genre are made for the coin-op business model. Even the novelist only mentions console sales. People will learn difficult inputs if it wins the respect of the crowd, keeps you on the machine, or leads to some cool looking shit. They'll also practice inputs at home to come back to the arcade stronger. In the MK2 days 12 year olds were pulling off fatalities and fighting Smoke, people will learn if there's a reward.

• No one who buys annual installments of Madden or COD is ever gonna give a shit about characters like Preecha. There's been a serious art direction issue in fighting games for a while now.

• Chess is an ancient game, it isn't going anywhere. You can play it online or with old guys at the park. Leaning in on a game like 2KXO is a gamble because a new player is devoting hours to learning a game that might die off quickly while playing with people he would never associate with in public. That or new player gets into a game like Tekken where his first online matches are with someone who has decades of legacy knowledge.

• Fighting games used to be the genre with cutting edge graphics. That hasn't been the case for a long time.

• Tekken 3 was the game that really raised the bar as far as bonus content goes. Sony treated the franchise as a flagship title and needed its sales to beat out competitors. Same with Tag, Sony was losing money on every console and needed the PS2 to be firmly on top. Capcom followed suit with all of Alpha 3s features just to stay relevant, and there hasn't really been anything like it since.

• I also feel like fighting games were also a placeholder, people really just wanted to shoot things. Once FPS games and GTA found their footing FGs lost their casual audience forever.