Fighting games have a product design problem

Fighting games in 2026 are floundering, with everything not called Street Fighter 6 relegated to the trash bin of history. The worst and most likely outcome is that other studios look at this and think SF6 is the destiny of the genre and try to mimic it to regain some relevance. This will predictably fail, and the genre’s future will ultimately be at the mercy of Street Fighter 7.

I present another path forward, one that would allow the genre to genuinely evolve into something greater, rather than follow its current path of devolution into mediocrity and irrelevance. This vision is borne from the following observations, which I will argue for:

  1. Fighting games are currently reaching roughly 1/10th of their potential audience.
  2. Changing the core game mechanics will have almost no effect on the genre reaching this potential.
  3. There are multiple other dimensions the genre can and must evolve along in order to reach this audience.

Fighting games peaked in the early ’90s. In this era almost everyone who played video games had played fighting games. By the end of the decade, there were new genres developing with Quake and StarCraft, but the accessibility of the arcade could not be matched. You didn’t need a LAN party or dial-up Internet to play against other players. They were just there. It also came with a built-in social environment that naturally addressed many of the issues modern fighting game players face such as feeling lost, unable to improve, or ranked anxiety. If you were having trouble, there was someone right there who had already been through it all and could talk you through it.

But by the turn of the millennium, the competition from PCs and home consoles had ramped into full gear. Counter-Strike (1999) evolved the fps genre into a team-based, more social experience. Halo (2001) and Xbox Live (2002) brought online matchmaking to the console. Grand Theft Auto III (2001) dominated the industry, creating the 3D open-world genre almost entirely from scratch. World of Warcraft (2004) offered a persistent social world with endless progression.

The Cambrian explosion of video games from around 1998–2005 can’t be overstated. Every genre was being pushed in every possible direction, new genres were being invented from thin air. Not only that, the home console and the Internet made them far more accessible, allowing people to play whatever they want from the comfort of their own home.

Many fighting games from this period are considered by fans of the genre as the best of all time:

Title Year Units Sold Est. Revenue
Super Smash Bros. Melee 2001 7.41M ~$370M
Tekken 5 2005 ~6M ~$300M
Soulcalibur II 2003 ~3–5M ~$150–250M
Tekken Tag Tournament 2000 ~2.4M ~$120M
Dead or Alive 4 2005 ~1–1.5M ~$60–90M
Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution 2003 ~1.5M ~$60M
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike 1999 <0.5M <$25M
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 2000 ~0.5–1M ~$25–50M
King of Fighters ’98 1998 ~0.3–0.5M ~$15–25M

However, despite this critical acclaim, the genre’s gross revenue declined over this period. While they weren’t commercial failures by any measure, none came close to Street Fighter 2’s ~15M unit sales and ~$1.5B revenue. Tekken 5, while much more successful than Tekken 4, still lagged behind Tekken 3’s sales. At the same time, the gaming industry as a whole experienced explosive growth, with World of Warcraft alone making $1–1.5B yearly, more than 2–3x the entire fighting game genre.

This stagnation went largely unnoticed at the time. Most major titles in the subsequent 2006–2013 period were all more of the same: lots of attention paid to the core game mechanics and little else. Many games had big departures in game mechanics from their previous titles, notably SFIV compared to 3rd Strike. These changes were not necessarily good or bad. Some were appreciated by fans, some weren’t. But to even bother debating if, say, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is an improvement is pointless. There is no world in which it was getting people to play it who weren’t still playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2. There was no evolution, only refinement.

It took upstarts in the genre with brand new IPs like Skullgirls (2012) and Killer Instinct (2013) to even attempt to make the genre playable online, 10 years after the rest of the industry was all-in on online gaming, but these games lacked the resources and industry know-how to produce something genuinely competitive in the wider market. Thus, they didn’t bring new players into the genre. Fighting game players are the only people who have ever heard of them. They were functionally tech demos for one singular thing that the now sclerotic genre had been failing to deliver on.

At this point the commercial failure of the genre was undeniable. Not only did its revenues continue to shrink, but the rest of the industry continued to grow. Fighting game developers panicked, attempting to reinvent themselves to evolve with the times, but they continued to do so in the only way they knew how: changing the core game mechanics.

This subsequent period of around 2014–2020 was the dark ages of fighting games. Sales were so abysmal that many developers were sideshows to their own publisher’s mobile gacha slopware. The common view is that Street Fighter V was so bad that it brought the whole genre down with it, but this is a misdiagnosis. It was the inevitable result of continuing to pretend they were still in the arcade era, that the core gameplay was the only thing that mattered. The games for this era are not that bad in terms of gameplay. Many would argue that games such as Tekken 7, Guilty Gear Xrd, Mortal Kombat X, and Soulcalibur VI have the best gameplay those series have to offer. They were, however, completely unfit as products in the broader gaming market.

Many in the FGC are cynical about the broader gaming market, or just people in general.

This perspective just doesn’t hold up at all with even a cursory glance at the broader market.

Of course most people don’t have the temperament to play fighting games. They aren’t for everyone. But there’s over 8 billion people on this planet. You don’t need to appeal to all of them. Even if only 1 in 1,000 people have this temperament (and this is absurdly pessimistic), that’s still 8 million people you could be appealing to. The goal is not appealing to everyone. It’s product-market fit.

There is one more argument people make for why fighting games can never grow out of their current niche.

Fighting games won’t get better because the FGC is so negative. Everyone is so eager to shit on every big patch and every new fighting game that comes out and kill the hype. If everyone was more positive and actually gave indie fighting games an honest chance, it’d show developers that there’s a market for something that isn’t Street Fighter.

A community leader deciding to soften their criticisms of a game or the genre with the goal of “growing the community” is effectively behaving as unpaid marketing for the video game developers. I don’t mean this dismissively. I’ve done plenty of this myself. There’s nothing wrong with this. But as a contribution to the business, that is what this is: marketing. And it’s pure hubris to think that marketing, and specifically the type of marketing you can contribute to the business, can so strongly override the customer’s actual experience with the product.

Customers don’t form their opinion on quality from marketing. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services. One can spend enormous amounts of money on quality [marketing], and yet if your products don’t live up to it, customers will not keep that opinion for long in their minds.

Now again, quality isn’t just the product or the service, it’s having the right product. Y’know, knowing where the market’s going and having the most innovative products, is just as much a part of quality as the quality of the construction of the product when you have it.

—Steve Jobs on quality

Now you might think this is a bit reductive, that in fact most people are not even trying the games at all, that they’re merely copying opinions from other people on social media. They never had “their own experience with the product.” For these people, more marketing might move the needle a little. Sure. It’s not an outlandish thesis.

I invite you to consider the case study of StarCraft II. In 2026, we know this game is a bad product. The player counts dwindle year over year. But the game’s downfall was predictable (and predicted) as far back as 2012.

How do we grow Starcraft 2?

You can’t.

This sounds like a dick answer, but I’m going into full-on asshole mode for this one. The people telling you that e-mailing sponsors to thank them for supporting teams etc…etc…and that it’s really helping the scene are lying to you, or are delusional.

There is only one person right now who can grow Starcraft 2 in the way it needs to grow. One entity, rather.

Blizzard.

Starcraft 2 is suffering from a lot of problems. It has been from the very beginning, but Blizzard has failed to address them time and time and time again. They are continually proving themselves utterly incompetent when it comes to managing a game as a competitive sport backed by a casual community.

—Starcraft 2 will be dead before Legacy of the Void if Blizzard doesn’t change its course

These criticisms were not invented by Destiny. They were product issues many customers had voiced already. But Destiny was the only loud voice willing to champion them. (Some of his suggestions are now dated. For example, custom maps in 2026 could never compete with Roblox. While maybe good ideas in 2012, the gaming market has since become far more competitive, so even with all these suggestions, StarCraft II would still be a bad product in 2026. But if Blizzard had actually made it a good product in 2012, it would have at least had a chance in 2026.)

Every other “community figure” thought that loudly voicing these criticisms would make them self-fulfilling. They decided to spend all their energy and effort into talking only about how great StarCraft II is, with the theory that this positive community sentiment would translate into growing the game. (Does this sound familiar?) And you know what? Fair game to them. They did a truly admirable job of this. The early StarCraft II era of content creation was one of the most innovative, forward thinking, and genuinely motivational in gaming history. These people more-or-less pioneered livestreaming and esports content creation. And yet it didn’t move the needle in the slightest. The game is still on life support. Meanwhile, the competitors that ate its lunch by being better products—League of Legends and Dota 2—are thriving, despite having what are widely considered the most toxic communities in all of gaming.

Every fighting game has had countless systematic changes to its core game mechanics throughout history in attempts to evolve the genre. Everything from removed motion inputs, cooldowns on specials, autocombos, simpler resource management, gimped assist mechanics; to degenerate setplay, highly complex motions, absurd movement tech, reduced input buffer, frame perfect defensive mechanics, 6-way tag mixups, full screen assist hitboxes, 1-touch setups—all of it’s been tried. None of it in any direction has had any noticeable impact on commercial success.

The current fashion, everything from Guilty Gear -Strive- (2021) to Tekken 8 (2024) to Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls (2026), is all about simplifying as much as possible to make the game more approachable, sanding off all the jagged edges, removing obscure tech to make the experience more refined. Street Fighter 6 is the most systemically homogenized game in the franchise.

For many in the FGC this trend is a waking nightmare. “The games all suck! The genre is ruined!” I am sympathetic to the criticism, but it’s a little histrionic. These critics worry about a problem that developers are all but eager to solve. As with all fashion trends, this one will pass. Eventually the games will be too simple, and there will be a hunger to put the complexity back in, with plenty of design space left for it. This trend is predictable, just as predictable as it is that none of the upcoming titles (e.g. Tokon, 2XKO) will be relevant outside of the current FGC niche.

None of this is to say that the core game mechanics don’t matter. They matter a great deal. Games need depth to keep players around past the 100th hour. But that is worth nothing if nobody ever gets to that 100th hour in the first place. If you can’t even get people in the door, the quality of the food is irrelevant.

The marketing pitch of every fighting game since the end of the arcade era: “We’ve changed the game to appeal to you. Now please come play!” 25 years of this failing is enough. We need to get serious. Changing the core game mechanics will not save us.

This is both a blessing and a curse. It means developers can stop chasing trends and overreacting to vocal outsiders who can never be pleased. They’re free to design their game with a coherent and unique vision. But it also means they can no longer neglect making their games complete pieces of software. They have to put the work in on the much less glamorous goal of product design.

What are fighting games lacking as products? This is the burning question. It’s an indictment of the genre’s developers that there are so many obvious answers:

These are literal table stakes for competitive video games made in the last 25 years. They’re not at all sufficient for a good product, but they are required. You could ask any jabroni at EVO what fighting games need and they would tell you this, and they would be right. Is that not absurd? Usually in a man-on-the-street interview you’d expect some absurdly niche answer that doesn’t make any sense, or just total nonsense pie-in-the-sky requests for infinite features and a $0 price tag. But for fighting games, the products are so bad that there are million dollar bills being left on the floor that anyone can see. For the most part these answers amount to, “Make it so I can actually play the fucking game.” And it’s like… duh! Making it easier for people to actually play your game sounds like kinda obvious??

However, I would have wasted your time if those were the only answers I had. You’ve heard all that before. I’m here to make the real bull case. To convince you that we can get that 10x, to convince developers that it’s worth investing in this cursed genre.

To get there, we gotta look deep in our souls and ask: What exactly is the point of fighting games? Why should I play these games instead of all the other games out there? I have never seen a serious answer to this question. I have however seen some surprisingly uninspired answers. Fantasy Strike says it’s all about yomi, man. It’s all about, like, the mind games, dude. He thought I was gonna do scissors but I, like, totally did paper. A more articulate answer comes from ComboFiend, one of the FGC oldheads hired to work on 2XKO:

If you were to actually think about it, these characters are just functions. They’re just doing things. Magneto, case and point, is a favorite because he has an eight-way dash and he’s really fast, right? So our most technical players, all they want to do is triangle jump and that kind of stuff. Well guess what? Nova can do the same thing. Captain Marvel can do the same thing. Ultron can do the same thing. Go ahead and try them out.

It’s just the function that people are associating with the character, and there’s no shortage of that. We made sure that all proper playstyles can be represented with our current roster. The design team has been looking at that very closely. We wanted to make sure that if a legacy character doesn’t happen to make the roster this time, that playstyle would still be represented. That somebody who has associated themselves with Magneto wouldn’t be lost coming into this title.

This is the sort of answer that only someone way too deep in the sauce can give. I’m sorry, what? I only want to play as Magneto because of his eight-way dash? Have you considered maybe it’s because Magneto is a badass motherfucker with a sick helmet who bends metal with his mind? Do you think PhiDX really likes to play Lili, Cammie, and Nina because of how they function?

Sorry, enough beating a dead horse.

Here’s my initial answer: A fighting game makes you feel like the main character in an action movie.

Now, have you ever wondered why every fighting game player loves Jackie Chan movies? “Sure, but everyone loves Jackie Chan? Rush Hour made 244 million dollars!” Yeah, and 13 other movies that year made more than that. And that was the Americanized, commodified Jackie Chan. How much money do you think Drunken Master made? The movie that inspired countless classic fighting game characters? The appeal of fighting games is inseparable from that of stylized wushu, kung fu, wuxia, etc. cinema.

This is critical to understand. It’s what separates the genre from your typical man-with-gun action game. In a man-with-gun story, the hero’s power comes from his weapon. It’s outside of the self. “But Ryu has fireballs, that’s like a gun, right?” No! Ryu’s fireball might have the same function as a gun, being a projectile weapon (albeit slower moving), but the source of this power, the thing that made the fireball exist, is within Ryu himself. It was not some tool he had on his belt, standard issue to every other marine in his platoon. It’s a mystical martial technique he spent years mastering.

In a martial arts narrative, the source of the character’s power must come from within. Following from this, the source of the player’s power must also be embodied. It too must come from within, because the player is the character. If you remove this association, the game’s ethos reverts to that of a man-with-gun narrative. It is a fundamentally different genre.

So here’s a refined answer: A fighting game makes you feel like the main character in a martial arts movie.

How does this relate to product design? Remember: “Knowing [the market] is just as much a part of quality as the quality of the construction of the product when you have it.” A perfectly designed game is worthless to someone who doesn’t want to play it. Deeply knowing the archetypal narratives and themes that resonate with the target market informs how the product is designed.

Here are some archetypal narratives of the genre:

Themes:

That last theme might sound weirdly worded (you expect “Power corrupts”), but it’s intentionally so. While apparently similar to “with great power comes great responsibility” common to superhero comics, this theme focuses more on the path by which power is cultivated. On the journey of self-mastery, the protagonist discovers a forbidden or destructive technique that would secure victory but at a spiritual or moral cost. The moral question regards the nature of the training itself, not the use of the power once acquired. Similar to the One Ring from Lord of the Rings, where the thesis is not that all power is inherently corrosive (a common misinterpretation), but that evil power cannot ever be used for good ends. The application is more to game design than product design, so forgive the digression, but the key insight is that fighting games should have “evil” play styles. Think the Brazilian Ken from SFIV or the crackhead Ryu in SF6. Scrubby options need to both exist and be powerful (and even potentially trap players into being unable to learn “fundies”, their mind forever tainted by scrubby tactics) to provide contrast to the “good” play styles. For all its faults, this is the one thing SF6’s Modern does well. (Parallels to the Majin Mark from Dragon Ball are not a coincidence!)

There’s more, but I cannot do the genre justice with words alone, so I’ll stop here and suggest anyone with a genuine interest in evolving the fighting game genre should watch more classic martial arts movies. It will give you deeper insight than any article could.

Now let’s use our understanding of these narratives and themes and combine them with our understanding of the genre’s history to realize its future.

First goal: Transplant the arcade into the digital realm.

Players need a space that provides the same social experience. The path of self-mastery is long and rarely does one do it alone. The fighter is not just motivated by the master, but also by his peers. The themes of “lineage and loyalty” and “master and student” don’t work when the system is organized entirely around the individual.

Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and -Strive- all tried to do this with e.g. Battle Hub and Tekken Lounge. What’s missing from all of these implementations:

Imagine opening the game and loading right into your clan’s dojo. You can physically see your online friends doing everything: playing sets, going through the story mode, using training mode, customizing their character, etc. Everything in the game is accessed from this virtual world. A player avatar representing someone in a ranked match is not hunched over an arcade cabinet but instead shadowboxing in the middle of a tatami mat. Training mode is represented by sparring with a wooden dummy. Watching replays is represented by meditating on the mat. You’re able to jump in and watch someone doing whatever it is they’re doing at any time, just like you could by shadowing someone at the arcade. Or perhaps it’s late at night and you’re the only one in your clan online and you may revel in the solitude. Suddenly these spaces are not weird, cordoned off sections of the game only for the freaks and loafers but a shared space for everyone enjoying the full range of what the game has to offer.

There are some problems that immediately come to mind. First of all, what if you don’t have a clan? And what if you’re offline, or just want to be alone? All solved in the same way: You still load into the same virtual space and access everything in the same way. There just aren’t any other player avatars visible anywhere. If you’re offline, this is just how the menu works.

“What if I want to be in more than one clan?” This one is important. Clan systems in many video games fail to address this properly. People, especially online, do not organize into distinct cliques. Everyone is in multiple different group chats, sometimes with many overlapping members in each. There should be minimal friction in switching between different clans, with chatting between multiple clans at the same time being a primary use case easily facilitated by the UI. Much like any serious group chat, you can see the full chat history whenever you jump in.

This would look a lot like FGC Discord servers: 1-2 major public clans in each region that more-or-less everyone is in (and that many don’t engage with as actively), then many more private splinter clans where people engage more with people they feel a closer camaraderie with. “So, what, your big idea is to put Discord in the game?” Yes! You’re putting the function that Discord currently serves into the game, but in a way that is coherent with the narrative and aesthetics of the genre. Much like how playing Magneto is ten times cooler than playing another character with the same “function”, this would be taking something that the customer demonstrably needs and integrating into the product itself in a way that feels right for the genre.

Also, some kind of clan battle system, resembling The Rival Schools archetype, would help take the edge off of the sweatiness of 1v1 games.

Second goal: A story mode that cultivates an appreciation for the game’s depth.

Current story modes don’t challenge you to learn the game’s mechanics or interact with it on any deliberate level. You can finish Tekken 8’s story mode just by mashing the whole time. The only real goal of these on a game design level is begging the player to keep playing them. “Please, please keep reading my epic shōnen slop.” It’s pathetic. They are so terrified of presenting the player with even the whiff of a roadblock that might make them put the controller down.

In 2026, where there are multiple examples of massively successful games with heavily front-loaded difficulty (e.g. Elden Ring, Sekiro, Hollow Knight, Cuphead), this refusal to challenge the player at the point where they are most invested is criminally negligent. Why exactly would you take a genre that is notoriously challenging and then spend the first 3 hours you get with the player teaching them nothing at all? It’s incoherent product design, targeting two entirely distinct markets at the expense of both.

In both The Student’s Journey and The Reluctant Hero, the fighter almost always doesn’t want to fight. This is such a staple of the genre that Jackie Chan makes it a bit. “I don’t want no trouble!” Just as well, the player doesn’t want to learn. The player is lazy. They won’t click a button with words like “training” or “tutorial” on them. You have to make them learn! And the easiest way to do this is throwing unforgiving bosses at them that beat the shit of them until they play the game properly.

I have written about this more extensively already: The wasted potential of fighting game story modes

This is the major reason F2P won’t work for fighting games, at least for now. Unless the core game mechanics are pick-up-and-play in the way that Brawlhalla’s are, you need an expensive story mode to act as the tutorial. That’s a big upfront development cost that needs to be recuperated somewhere. In the F2P business model, you’re selling cosmetics, but you can’t go right out the gate expecting massive cash flows. It has to build up slowly. The value of the cosmetics and battle passes on a live service game is directly proportional to how long that service has already been live for. Whales aren’t going to buy your cosmetics like they buy Counter-Strike skins, and minnows aren’t going to buy battle passes like they do in Fortnite, if they aren’t confident your game will be around in 6 months. So not only do you have to wait 2-3 years minimum for the game’s development, you also need to wait another 2-3 years to build up enough trust in your live service ecosystem for people to want to spend big on it before you can expect the mere chance to see a return on investment. And this is the best case scenario, if the game is actually good and successful and not a flop or bogged down in development hell. ~$40–100 million invested and 4-6 years before you can expect to see any ROI at all? Good chance of a total flop that makes it a near 100% loss? Maximum possible return is only 4–5x? This is not an attractive looking investment. It’s all risk, no reward. If instead players pay $40–100 upfront then both the cash flow is better (get returns much sooner) and the risk is lower (even a total flop will get at least 20–30% back instead of 0%).

(If the genre were better saturated, you could get away with no story mode, and then maybe you could get away with F2P. Shooters don’t need tutorials because everyone already knows how to play them. The target market has enough genre XP. For fighting games in 2026, the target market is mostly untapped, so this product strategy of undercutting bigger competition by being leaner doesn’t make much sense.)

The “Paid DLC Characters” business model however should be abandoned. The sales numbers on these are not good enough to justify making the product catalogue so much more confusing. There’s no way to do this without making new customers horribly confused by the difference between e.g. Ultimate Edition, Definitive Edition, and Originals Edition. The paradox of choice is a mortal sin in sales. You’ve already got a customer wanting to buy. Just close the damn deal!

So the best business model is a hybrid live service where players pay upfront for the base game (to reduce tail-risk and help with cashflow), and then cosmetics pay for continued development (potentially massive long-tail returns from whales).

Third goal: Single-player modes that amplify the fighting game and that are fun in their own right.

Grinding ranked over and over isn’t that appealing as an end-game. Even serious ranked grinders aren’t playing more than a few hours a day and often need extended breaks. “Just suck it up and go through the gruelling process of learning The Art, and then you can… grind ranked all day!” This isn’t a good sales pitch. Single-player content is obviously needed so people have something else to do when they’re tired of ranked. It’s so obvious that I’m sure you’ve heard this before.

But when people ask for “single-player content”, what they usually mean is “make a totally different game in a totally different genre but mash the fighting game into it somehow.”

These game modes are often beloved by fighting game players, so they ask for more of these. But this is such a ridiculous request. Just be serious for a moment. Tekken Force isn’t going to compete with Streets of Rage 4 because Streets developers are serious about beat-em-ups specifically. They’re diehards and experts of the genre, while the Tekken developers are just tourists of it. World Tour is a joke compared to literally anything else in the open-world RPG genre. (You better have Morrowind tier writing if you think you can get away without voice acting in 2023.)

But put these historical cases aside. Let’s assume you can somehow make such a mode and make it as good as the genre experts you’re aping. It would still not be a value multiplier to the fighting game. Maybe you could get a bunch of Fire Emblem players to buy your game by putting a clone of that in your fighting game, but they still won’t convert into fighting game players. For one, they are not necessarily the target market. But more importantly, there’s absolutely no skill transfer between these modes. They don’t feed into each other at all. They’re entirely distinct experiences. At best you’ve de-risked a little by bundling two games into one. But then how good of an idea does that sound? Imagine if every time you wanted to buy a chair you had to buy a cabinet alongside it. “But they’re both furniture!” Yeah, but I’ve already got a nice cabinet. This is what you’re asking for when you put a beat-em-up inside a fighting game. It’s bad product strategy.

No, what’s needed from these single-player modes is something that amplifies every other mode. This is hard. “$genre but with Street Fighter characters” is as easy as it is useless. Of course other modes outside of the actual fighting game will to some extent be aping other genres. For example, the story mode I talk about would largely be taking inspiration from character-action games. It’s not that aping other genres is wrong per se, but that they need to come together into a coherent, fully-featured, singular product, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I can only think of two single-player modes that would do this for fighting games. Both would be massive value multipliers, and surely others can come up with more.

First single-player mode: Training routines, similar to rhythm game charts. Routines can vary from simple (block and punish a single move) to impossibly complex (defend with perfect mixed strategy comprising reactions, fuzzies, option selects, optimal punishes, tight links, etc.). Routines are done in 2–10 minute sessions and your performance is scored. The obvious examples are things like combo trials, anti-air practice, reversal punishes, throw break practice, etc. but the range of possible routines is more-or-less limitless.

“But you can already do this. Just set them up yourself in training mode?” How fun would a rhythm game be if you had to make all the charts yourself, and you had to remake them every time you wanted to play, and there was zero feedback from the game about how well you performed? No high scores to compare your performance to other players? Sure, some people would find such a game fun, but most people won’t bother with all that.

Training mode is a sandbox. Street Fighter 6 has an incredible training mode that more-or-less lets you set up anything at all with relative ease. But it’s still a sandbox. It’s not a game mode you can turn to when you’re burnt out or want a break from ranked. On the contrary, using training mode properly, setting those routines up, picking the right routines, etc. requires even more executive function than grinding ranked does. That’s why it feels like torture for so many people to use it at all. “Why waste my grey matter on training mode when I could play ranked instead?” Ditto for reviewing replays. Both are fantastic power-user features, but they’re not drawing people in to actually play the game for extended periods.

Almost every element of good rhythm game design could be incorporated into such a game mode, but it’s a lot of work to get it right. How are the routines made? User generated or developer curated? How should the “routine editor” work? Does the player have to play as a specific character, or can routines be done by any character? If the latter, how do you handle characters having unique options to handle certain situations, or sometimes lacking standard options? What happens when patches break a routine? How do you evaluate performance? What sort of feedback should the player get while playing? These questions and many more need to be answered and answered well. A tight loop and lots of feedback is essential to making this as “brain off” as possible. The goal is to empower the player to train their “body” without having to think too much. This does of course require that the core game design is such that hard things actually exist, but I think even current generation fighting games have enough difficult things that such a mode would work well for them.

Second single-player mode: Dress-up. Character customization.

This is a quickly growing and grossly under-appreciated genre (probably because it appeals mostly to women whereas most game developers are men). Dress to Impress has been the most popular game in Roblox for over 2 years now. Fighting games are perfectly positioned to tap into this emerging genre. Most other live-service games have some fundamental reason why they can’t. For first person shooters, the player’s character model isn’t visible on the screen at all. Third person shooters are not much better, since all you can see is the back of the character. In MOBAs the character models are too small to see most details. Fighting games, on the other hand, have characters taking up as much space on the screen as possible at all times, viewed from side profile and on both sides.

These already exist to some extent, but they are for the most part not that interesting. Soulcalibur VI has probably the best character customization in the genre, but even this is still dwarfed by Code Vein. And both of these pale in comparison to Dress to Impress, which is kind of embarrassing. How are you losing on quality to a Roblox game?

Such a game mode if done right (i.e. there’s enough substance that people who like the genre take it seriously, instead of it mostly being used to make giant cubes and hideous monstrosities) would tie in well with the social features mentioned earlier. The problem Dress to Impress faces is that players are only really able to show off their creations to other like-minded players. They can’t exist in any broader context. So a lot of these players spend more time in MMOs like Final Fantasy XIV instead, despite it having fairly underdeveloped dress-up features—it gives a social context for their creations to exist in. Putting the dress-up game inside a fighting game with good social features solves that problem entirely. Sweaty ranked players would love to have someone who can make tasteful customs join their clan and make customs for them. Players live spectating other people doing stuff (e.g. ranked, training mode, routines) could have their custom character appear in the background, giving a meaningful social context for their creations to exist in. Also, all of those fighting game animations and model rigs are basically emotes but on steroids. Even Fortnite can’t compete with this ability to make a character custom come alive.

Fighting games are bad products, not bad games. The genre’s 25-year fixation on core game mechanics has been an endless distraction to avoid facing this reality. What I’ve suggested here are only starting points: virtual spaces fit for the online era that recapture the arcade’s social environment (not its physical one), story modes that teach instead of pander, and single-player modes that amplify rather than distract. There are surely other angles I haven’t considered.

What I most want to get across is this: Until fighting game developers start thinking about their games as products that are competing in a broader gaming market, and understand that in this context they have fallen way behind, nothing is going to change. But if they overcome this, they won’t be fighting for scraps over the tiny pie that is the current FGC. They’ll be growing the pie and getting the biggest slice for themself. The industry is being taken over by challenging games with AA budgets and a laser focus on their target audience, and fighting games are a perfect fit for that.

What do you think? Has this given you some new perspective on how fighting games can evolve as products? Do you have other ideas for single-player modes that would be a value multiplier (and not just a sideshow) to the rest of the game?