I agree with what Max said: this only makes sense for Japan, which’s bizarre because they made a ton of effort to broaden the audience of SF6 outside of Japan and it’s a shame to have that jeopardized out of greed.
Some old, evil executive saw all the goodwill they’ve been building up and got upset, probably.
They’ve been making a lot of effort to expand the “old” FGC (so basically Street Fighter) outside of Japan for a few years now. It hasn’t really taken hold (and I am going to pretend it is because everyone is like me and gets off on watching Guilty Gear!) and we see more and more Saudi money being pumped into “Western” FGC events.
So I can see an argument for doubling down on their core audience to lock that in.
And… PPVs ARE kind of making a comeback in The West. People are increasingly annoyed by “needing so many streaming services”. And, at least in pro wrestling, AEW have kind of been cleaning up with their 4-6 PPVs a year. The HBO Max deal helps a lot for people to watch the weekly show but… it is fricking HBO Max and a lot of folk are still taking the route of “I skip Dynamite and just watch the PPVs”. And the human trafficking front known as WWE are starting to shift back that way as a result of, among other things, their ESPN deal. Companies have been desperate for more and more “event television” as streaming takes over (hence why AEW and WWE can get such lucrative tv contracts) and nothing is more “event” than paying 30-70 bucks to sit around the TV on a Saturday night.
So I think it is less “a few greedy execs want to burn away the goodwill” and more… the overall industry trends.
I cannot fathom how this move is better for them than a larger audience with baked-in ads. This isn‘t some huge event with mainstream appeal. I‘d hope they ran the numbers, but nowadays I‘m not so sure.
The whole point of running an event like this in the first place is that’s an enormous ad for the video game that they sell. Putting up a paywall in front of it just seems counter productive.
I watch a lot of fgc creators and the general consensus is the game is simply so much bigger in Japan then the rest of the world and the Japanese will pay to watch it. Japanese SF6 content creators have better viewership numbers than the biggest fgc content creators like Max and Sajam. Japanese only tournaments are almost as big viewership wise as some worldwide tournaments like evo. So essentially it comes down to the majority of the audience is in Japan and because of that they can actually expect to convert a lot of that audience to pay per view because of japanese consumers habits. They already did it for street fighter league japan as well. I would assume to test the waters for this. It doesn’t bode well for them internationally but a lot of Japanese companies dont really care about international audiences. Unless the international audience is too big to ignore which for street fighter 6 doesnt appear to be the case.
And people will still pay it, just like people bought Switch 2s in record numbers and just like the ROG Ally X (Xbox handheld) will sell well.
I’m sure those who say they won’t are telling the truth, but most of them were never planning on buying it. Those who were will roll over like they always do.
It’s sad, but I’m somewhat rooting for $80-100 games and other BS like this, because I know at some point the frog will jump out of the water, we’ll have another video game crash, and after a few years things will return to sanity. But unlike last time, we all have huge backlogs — it won’t hurt gamers nearly as much as it will big publishers. I think it may even be good for indies.
What I’m really rooting for though: more indie games, more weird games, more dumb games that appeal to a niche and are loved by them for years to come that most people don’t get. A shift away from platform exclusivity. A shift away from Windows to both Mac and Linux. Something like Proton (LInux tool for emulating Windows games) on Mac. I’m fine with gaming being fine on Windows and Xbox, but it should still be fine if you don’t want to throw any money at Microsoft.
I absolutely loved Lies of P. I am too afraid of souls games but this was quite tightly scoped and very approachable for me (consumables were a neat solution to most of my problems). The music was spot on too!
And more importantly, it looked great and ran so well on all platforms. I can totally see them going the survival horror route, just that I feel we’ve had enough Resident Evil likes lately (even Alan Wake 2 feels like that).
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