This post was brought about the recent announcement of Tekken 7 hitting the milestone of 3 million sales. Fighting games have always been about being competitive in nature, because of this as well as the grassroots esports scene, it makes it very hard to get into fighting games from a casual perspective. With games as a service becoming more of a prevalent model, modern games need to be easy to get into but have longevity and depth to sustain the player base for an extended period of time. This is often hard to do with fighting games, as while they have longevity and depth, they are often hard to get into.
First, we will divide the fighting game genre through casual and hardcore. Casual will have widespread appeal, where hardcore will be much more niche. It is important to note that just because a game is hardcore or casual, doesn’t mean it has a depth or lacks thereof, but instead is directly derived from sales. For the sake of this ranking, I will only be using the most recent titles in their respective franchises. There is a number of ways to break down fighting games, in this case, I am showing overall sales, and active player base.
| Fighting Games | Sales | Active Players (From Steam) | Estimation for all Active players | Date update for sales |
| Street Fighter V | 2.10 Million | 1230 | 2460 | 20-Jun-18 |
| Tekken 7 | 3.00 Million | 2826 | 5652 | 15-Oct-18 |
| Smash Bros Melee | 4.06 Million | 3847 | 3847 | 1-Sep-07 |
| Mortal Kombat XL | 5.00 million | 694 | 728.7 | 1-Oct-15 |
| Guilty Gear Xrd | 340,000 | 10 | 20 | 1-Apr-16 |
| Soul Calibur | 1.50 Million | 9663 | 19326 | 22-Oct-18 |
| Injustice 2 | 2.26 Million | 378 | 756 | 1-Jun-17 |
| Dragonball Fighter Z | 2.50 Million | 1976 | 3952 | 31-Mar-18 |
| Blazeblue | 1.10 Million | 150 | 225 | 5-Jun-18 |
| Smash Bros 4 | 14.65 Million | 2698 | 2698 | 30-Jun-18 |
| Killer Instinct | 6.00 Million | 24 | 36 | 29-Mar-16 |
Given this information, let’s go into why these games sold well or didn’t sell well in the next blog post. We can put these games into two categories, Casual, and hardcore. Casual will be games over 3 Million Sales and Hardcore will be less than 3 Million. Before diving deeper into the numbers, I would like to share a few caveats for games that are new this year. Games such as Street Fighter and Tekken have had 3 years to increase sales. Whereas Dragonball Fighter Z and Soul Calibur are new this year (With Soul Calibur’s Numbers being skewed as the game is a week old as of this post). It is also important to note that fighting games post-launch are often upheld by the community, mostly in terms of esports and the competitive scene, which is how Street Fighter V and Tekken has sustained the player base, whereas Injustice 2 and Mortal Kombat, which both sold well, has less player base after a couple of years. To understand why some games sold better than others lets take a look at the marketing (or lack thereof) for each of these games and the unique principles each game has in common
When we look at the casual fighting games, none stick out as much like Super Smash Brothers 4 and to an extent, Super Smash Brothers Melee. With a whopping 18 million total sales between the Wii U, 3DS, and GameCube systems, this franchise is the best selling fighting game out there. There are plenty of reasons for this massive amount of sales, so let’s take a dive deeper into the marketing strategies at Nintendo. Right off the bat, Smash Bros by some is not a full fighting game, as it is not a standard fight until health bar hits zero kinds of game. Instead, the stage matters and the goal is to get the opponent off the stage, and the more damage they take, the easier it is to hit the opponent off stage. This gameplay mechanic is not only unique but eases up a barrier to entry that most fighting games have. When the game was first created, it was not even considered a fighting game, but a party game as stated by the creator: Masahiro Sakurai. However, due to the uniqueness of the game, fans of highly competitive play gravitated toward the genre. It introduced a new sort of skill required within fighting games, as well as having the large appeal of having popular characters from various games.
The demand has spiked for the game and recently various developers have been trying to recreate the ‘platform fighter’ genre with games like Rivals of Aether, Brawlhalla, and ICONS as Smash Bros. is the only popular game of this style. When compared to the competition Smash Bros has key features that give it the edge in sales against other fighting games. These features include character roster, casual play, and various game modes. First is characters or roster choice, in which Smash has 54 characters from over 30 different franchises with each character containing there own unique moveset. Considering this, odds are your favorite character from a Nintendo franchise exists in the game already. Guest characters are nothing new to the fighting game community but none are quite as extensive as Smash Bros. To generate hype for new iterations of Smash Bros, Nintendo has deployed a unique way to introduce new characters with the Challenger Approaching videos. These videos introduce new characters in a fun and unique way that keeps the audience guessing on who the next character was going to be and generated hype when a fan favorite final made it into the final roster.
The next feature is the more casual features. When looking at the competition, there is a distinct focus on the competitive aspects. Let’s compare features for Smash Bros when compared to Tekken 7, which is the most active competitive player-base aside from smash bros. For single player, Tekken 7 has a story mode, an arcade mode, as well as a training mode to practice your skills. Smash Bros has more casual features. The latest iteration of Smash Bros does not have a story mode, but past games have. Instead of a story mode, Smash 4 has a classic mode, all-star mode, event match, and trophy rush. In terms of single-player modes, Smash Bros has more features with only a slight edge to Tekken for having a story mode.
Where fighting games prosper is the notion of competitive fighting post-launch. When we look at the features offered for a casual audience it is clear that Tekken focuses purely on a high-level competitive play with game modes such as local versus, of course, opponents online in ranked or unranked matches. There’s also a tournament mode where you can set up large brackets. The issue regarding these game modes as they have a high barrier to entry for any casual play. Anyone who doesn’t play regularly will be at a disadvantage online, but with the story mode completed there isn’t much left for causal players. Where Smash Bros does have the competitive online feature with the For-Glory game modes, It’s online and offline multiplayer modes are more plentiful with every single player mode being able to be played with up to 4 – 8 other players depending on the game modes. On top of this, there is a part mode called smash tour and fun side events called stadium which have nothing to do about fighting.
When looking at the fighting game genres Based on features and characters, it is easy to see how Smash Bros has sold so many units when compared to the competition. When making new fighting games, I believe it is important to have depth in the combat, but casual features to sell the game, over the high barrier of entry. Of course, the trick is to walk the fine line of having a feature creep with unnecessary modes.
For the marketing of these games, we can see the casual features are more marketable than the professional esports features. Where the competitive community will purchase a game like Tekken, Street Fighter, and Injustice, the features that have the most ability to be marketable to a large audience is the casual features. When moving forward in making and marketing a fighting game, it is important to note that the barrier to entry would be for the series.
Austin Easler Game Marketing 