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What do you think the new age of fighting games will look like?
The pandemic has fundamentally drawn a line between the older generation/community of fighting game players and the newer generation who started playing/getting serious during lockdowns and only know netplay as the default (of course, most of the previous generation was the same, but that's beside the point). How do you think this will change the face of the FGC, such as it is, in the coming years? I think the single most prominent change is that the crybullying faggot player archetype will become even more common in the FGC than it was before - people already got upset at offline events, but online events enable them to cultivate their own neuroses to a far higher degree without being forced to interact with other people.
On the bright side, I think (or would like to believe) that fighting game developers are aware that now more than ever, they need to ship a complete product. People are generally pissed off paying for games with small rosters, no meaningful single player content, and multiple season passes of DLC planned. Street Fighter 6 seems poised to remind people what's fun about SF, given that it seems not to be a rushed, half finished mess like SFV was, which is good. Games from other developers like SNK (SamSho 2019, KoFXV), ArcSys (DBFZ, GBVS, GGStrive, DNF Duel), and Bamco (Soul Calibur VI, Tekken 7) all seem to have crippling flaws in one way or another despite their appealing qualities.
SNK's games barely function and have atrocious UIs. ArcSys's games are much the same, but at least the netcode works when you aren't being prevented from joining due to server traffic errors. Bamco really only has Tekken these days, and they're doing their best to drive community goodwill into the ground with slapdash balance patches, poor community interaction, and aggressive DLC practices like charging $4 for frame data.
Anecdotally, I think a lot more people are playing on buttonbox controllers; apparently there were tonnes of them at Combo Breaker, and a lot of the people I remember from my local scene are starting to use them. Things like playing on PC, various brands of prebuilt button boxes (Snackbox Micro, Hitbox, Mixbox) and the inherent shittiness of arcade sticks have made the prospect of using a keyboard or buttonbox much more appealing.
>What have you been playing for the last two years?
>Do you have an offline scene in your community now that normalfags are starting to go outside their houses?
>Are there any games you're looking forward to?