Mortal Kombat 1 has been out for more than nine months now and just recently saw Final Kombat play out with a 1st place reward of $200,000, but the numbers don’t lie… people just aren’t engaging with this game to the degree one would expect of a new Mortal Kombat.
We have said numbers from a few different avenues: Final Kombat Last Chance Qualifier attendees, Evo 2024 entrants, and Steam users, all of which see the game wildly under performing.
Where you’d expect a AAA fighting title like MK1 to be in competition with the likes of the latest Tekken and Street Fighter, people just aren’t showing up to play. Below is a graph tracking the active users on Steam from the game’s launch back in September of last year to this month.
What we see is a spike after initial release to just over 38k concurrent users, and then a steady decline with occasional spikes coinciding with the releases of anticipated DLC characters.
This pales in comparison to Street Fighter 6’s release some three months prior, which peaked at about 70k active PC users, (a number that was nearly eclipsed in 11 months after launch when Akuma was released) especially when you consider Mortal Kombat’s incredible momentum in recent years.
While games like Street Fighter may have a more hardcore/competitive audience, MK’s general reach is undeniably more broad. Recent Street Fighter entries have sold in the sub 10 million range (SF4 sold 8.5, SF5 sold 7.5, and SF6 is currently at 3.3 million) while Mortal Kombat X and 11 hit just under 11 and just over 15 million, respectively.
With so many more potential players, it’s surprising to hear that MK1 has sold just 3 million copies as of November 2023, and to see that on Steam it regularly wrestles with its predecessor as MK11 frequently gets more concurrent users and has actually led MK1 consistently since mid April.
Vitriol dripped heavily from the live chats as viewers criticized the lack of character diversity in the finals of Final Kombat, and while it’s easy to argue that stream chat opinions can be extremely fickle, the fact that only 72 people entered the Final Kombat Last Chance Qualifier (compare to the 321 that attended the Capcom Cup X LCQ) and the picture of a game that people aren’t resonating with becomes increasingly vivid.
The community has already been pointing to and analyzing the issues with MK1 widely since it dropped back in September, citing instantly stale assist-based gameplay as the main culprit. The game has also had some issues with DLC pricing, but widely checks tons of key boxes.
The game’s roster is filled with plenty of mainstays as well as tasteful returns for some legacy characters that’ve been absent for quite a while, and it has expected single player modes that let users explore a reasonably interesting MK story as well as climb arcade ladder style towers.
It also boasts strong visuals (save for on the Nintendo Switch, of course) that emphasize enticing character models, beautiful background settings, and serve as crucial foundations for the franchise’s gory trademark: Fatalities.
Still we see lack of community interest as the most recent update for Evo 2024 registration numbers sees the game in the second to least popular slot, being bested by the likes of not only Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8, but also Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising, Street Fighter 3, and Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes].
From a unique takes on seemingly everything from chess to Mario Kart, Mortal Kombat has always been a franchise that tries new things. These ventures are obviously not always successful, but have traditionally been forgiven, perhaps because they’re usually tied to secondary modes and not directly to the main gameplay action.
Is it really just MK1’s assist-based Kameo system (and maybe a little in-game economic ill-will) that’s causing such a seemingly otherwise fleshed out Mortal Kombat experience to flop? Surely there’re ways of balancing approaches to gameplay to make things more fun or engaging, as we’ve seen plenty of fighting games based around this style of combat reach lofty heights in the past.
Chime into the comments with your thoughts as to why MK1 just doesn’t seem to be clicking and what kinds of changes you’d propose to get it on the right track.