The notion that no one wants to play fighters in the arcade anymore is silly. Apparently Capcom and Namco
thinks so when it comes to the US but I have noticed a very interesting trend in my two weeks of running the arcade – there are a lot of fighting fans out there who want to play fighters in arcades, even if they can get them at home. I had a lot of people ask about Marvel VS. Capcom so I looked into it, found one and it’s arriving today. I’ve been a little surprised by the thirst for fighters as it is still quite strong and in Japan developers seem to realize this but in the US they seem to ignore it for the most part, hence the official lack of Tekken 6 and Street Fighter IV to the streets (of course the outrageous price tags don’t help either). At the very least we’ll be seeing Dark Presence from US developer Galloping Ghost later this year but beyond that the fighter scene was looking grim outside of Japan.
Until now that is. Fortunately there is another developer who is going to test out their new fighting game here in the US, as Kotaku reports, Aksys Games will be testing out their new and highly anticipated fighter BlazBlue at the Anime Expo in Los Angeles from July 3rd to the 6th. I had thought that this would only be seen as an import here but I’m glad to be wrong on that. Hopefully the game will test well, find distribution and come out at a reasonable price. If they need another location to test at, I’d be happy to host it for a couple of days as being a location tester would be very cool.
[BlazBlue Debuting at AnimeExpo – Kotaku] [Discuss on the Forum]
I agree with your observation – we are seeing something the Stinger has tagged as Player-Power. This means a company’s US or UK satellite feels so entrenched by fans demanding the coin-op version, ahead of a planned consumer release, that they relent and bring ‘demonstration’ or ‘test’ machines over to placate the players.
The whole Battle of Destiny SFIV appearance, or the new Anime Expo Blu appearance all show the ‘Player-Power’ issue. The problem is that the satellite operation has to depend on fan support to keep momentum going on the immanent home console release of these games. Critical web forum coverage putting great pressure on marketing men.
But there is another problem in showing the arcade version in these territories, leaving themselves open to the danger that the home version will be compared to the arcade version and the cracks in th PS3 and XB360 ability to render arcade quality brawlers will be revealed. I have already heard of complaints about the difference between the arcade and home version of T6!
No offense, but the Fighter genre of garbage games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat is one of the many things that killed the vintage arcades back in the day. The era that SF and it’s thousands of knock offs hit it big is the same era that the arcades went extinct. Game designers put 100% of their effort into consoles and just threw out 10,000 SF knock offs to finish off the arcades. Seriously, people won’t pay to stand up to play a game that they can play at home for free.
I’ve been saying it for years, games like Dance, Dance revolution and Silent Scope proved that people will still pay to play arcade games– there just has to be something there that people can’t get at home.
The old beat-’em-up fighter games have ran their course. It’s time for something new– that can’t be had on a console… Like a version of SF with boxing gloves and nose bleed-inducing electric shocks. Now were talking.
No offence taken. On the other hand, I need to ask – have you actually been to an arcade lately?
I don’t know where you live, but certainly in Europe fighting games are in very short supply. I attend arcade trade shows each year for this website, and the fighting genre is not heavily represented at all. I can’t think of a single game shown at EAG 2010, and at ATEI last year I only saw Street Fighter IV and Tekken 6 (both of which attracted the biggest crowds of the show – I was very lucky to even get a picture of SFIV).
As for whether people will pay to play fighting games, I’ll have to respectfully disagree. They do have a limited appeal in general. That’s because they are usually available on console, can be relatively underwhelming to look at as well and are often geared towards the hardcore. But if that hardcore is in your area, then you’d be doing yourself a disservice not to run a fighting game or two as the hardcore fighting fans are typically consistent, repeat customers.