LogFAQs > #967679575

Most fighting games tend to have higher barriers of entry that don't lend to the "easy to learn hard to master" as most other genres have. Sure that barrier of entry has been reduced with a lot of modern games now, but I'm just speaking of generality and especially in the past.

Some barrier of entry include: Full price tag upfront if you want to be matched with people around your skill level. The longer a fighting game is in circulation, the more likely you're going to be pitted against people who've played the game for almost all of their life. This also means you can't just "try" a game to see if you like it or not, you have to commit to it or return the game which is an additional step. Second barrier of entry is: most games being 1v1. Playing 1v1 just means more anxiety, any mistake you make is on you and the only thing you can either blame is the online if it "lags" on you. You notice the most popular multiplayer games tend to have either a battle royale element where there's a third party that can get between you and your enemies or team base where it takes some of that anxiety away from you. The third barrior of entry is the controls like motion inputs: if you don't commit to memorizing and learning how to play the game it's super difficult to get into. The final barrier of entry is the thing I fucking hate the most: garbage netcode like DBFZ and Smash Ultimate.

Like I said all of this barrier of entry stuff is being solved more and more with future fighting games, which is absolutely a good sign for things to come. Project L will be the testament to see if F2P traditional fighting games can be viable or not.