You’ll spend 100 rounds losing before you’ll score your first win. Combo execution is extremely challenging, plus you have to learn how to do so from two directions. Everyone who has actually stuck around is impossibly better than all newcomers… You don’t have to spend too much time in the fighting game community before you’ll hear the widely accepted notion that our genre of preference is relatively harder than most others in the world of gaming, and that a direct consequence of that is a lack of accessibility which naturally leads to lower popularity.
The notion that fighting games are uniquely more difficult is one that prominent fighting game YouTuber JM Crofts disagrees with, and he did so publicly with a recent X post that got him into some hot water with quite a few disagreeing commenters. Crofts decided the matter now has enough momentum that it’d be worth creating a full video on, and so he’s done just that.
Reminder that the notion that Fighting Games are uniquely difficult in a way that other genres don’t compare to is BS https://t.co/sYTAZbJQob
— John Crofts (jmcrofts) (@crofts) September 8, 2024
Those who have been paying attention to fighting game development in the last decade or so have surely noticed a rise in developer prioritization of accessibility, which would indicate that the likes of Capcom, Bandai Namco, NetherRealm Studios and others do feel their titles could be more new user friendly.
Indeed the term “accessibility” has been ubiquitous in the fighting game space for a handful of years now, but the ability to start winning relatively quickly is only one facet of accessibility.
It’s here that we should perhaps ask ourselves an important question: to what extent have we been synonymizing accessibility with propensity to win quickly?
The fighting game experience is by no means defined only by competitive play, in fact the two best selling fighting game franchises of all time, Super Smash Bros. and Mortal Kombat, owe their ascensions much more to casual crowds than hardcore competitive ones.
Simplified control schemes are suddenly quite prominent in franchises in which they hadn’t been for the longest time, but there’s also been noticeable efforts to increase single player content, online fluidity, and proximity to popular culture in AAA fighting titles like Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat.
Might it have been that fighting games, which have seen immense booms in popularity following the releases of older titles which are unequivocally harder to execute in than the titles of today, failed to keep up with the times in other more significant ways?
Did fighting games get a bit lost in trying to replicate what made them successful in the 90’s while the likes of first person shooters, card games, MOBAs, and battle royales honed in on aspects like network play, proximity to popular culture, and more immediately satisfying gameplay?
JM Crofts approaches this topic in part by looking at the intuition required to play modern fighters, offering up specific examples of relatively easy fighting game strategies that certainly score wins early on, and then turns attention to facets of the experience that he argues are likely much more responsible for the genre’s subpar reputation when it comes to accessibility.
Give his video a watch below and let us know where you come down on the debate about the relative difficulty of fighting games. Is intuition leading to the ability to win quickly really the main rub, and will the genre continue to struggle relative to others in the future?