The SF6 Announcement Trailer Was Good: Let's Talk About Fighting Game Business Models

After the disappointing teaser trailer Capcom dropped earlier this year, I was surprised to find myself coming away extremely impressed after watching the recent Street Fighter 6 announcement trailer. What made me truly optimistic is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (which I touched on in my recent video): fighting game business models.

Fighting games have always had to contend with having to appeal to and satisfy two pretty separate audiences:

1. People focused on the competitive multiplayer experience

2. People who are interested in single-player content

Obviously there’s some overlap—there are plenty of people who enjoy both. However, I think there are huge portions of the fighting game audience who care mostly about just one or the other. This isn’t necessarily surprising, but it can put fighting game makers in a tough spot. You can choose to focus on just one of the two groups or you can try to please both, but each approach has its own challenges. 

Business Models: Three Paths

Let’s step outside fighting games for a second and look at shooters—a genre that has to navigate this same challenge. You see three main approaches in the shooter space:

1. Multiplayer only (only aim for audience #1):

• CS:GO

• Fortnite

• Apex Legends

2. Singleplayer only (only aim for audience #2):

• Half-life series

• Metro series

3. Both (which is really just two separate games inside of a single game to try and please both audiences)

• Gears of War series

• Call of Duty series

Multiplayer-only shooters are mostly free to play. This helps build a huge userbase (key for long-term player engagement) and with that large userbase, they can monetize in various ways (selling cosmetics or whatever). There are plenty of shooters solely focused on this space which do well. Fortnite banks billions in profit annually.

Singleplayer-focused shooters can charge standard retail prices and people are cool with that. Everybody is accustomed to spending $60+ on AAA singleplayer experiences. I would also put games like Doom (2016) in this category. While it has a multiplayer component, nobody really cares about it. The game’s success is solely due to its singleplayer campaign.

Games that do both, like the Call of Duty series, still charge standard retail price, and people are fine with it because the campaign is substantial enough that the $60 feels justified even if you ignore multiplayer completely.

There are a few games that fall outside this three category paradigm (like Overwatch), but I think it pretty cleanly describes most of the shooter market.

How do fighting games fit into all of this?

Back at the genesis of the genre, I think fighting game makers were mostly focused on the multiplayer audience, which makes sense for the arcade environment. Standards for single-player content were pretty low in the early console days (SNES/Sega Genesis era), that people were happy with ports of games like Street Fighter II, even though the singleplayer was usually limited to arcade mode.

For a time, fighting game makers did a pretty good job of satisfying both the singleplayer and multiplayer audiences with games like Soul Calibur, up into maybe the sixth generation of consoles (Dreamcast/PS2/GameCube/Xbox). But then, as we got into the PS3/Xbox 360 and PS4/Xbox One era, fighting game devs couldn’t decide which audience to aim for or what they wanted to be. 

I think Street Fighter V is the poster child for this identity crisis. It really seemed like there were people within Capcom with radically different ideas of what the game should be, and the game was a mess at launch. It really felt like SFV was supposed to be a free-to-play title, aimed squarely at the multiplayer audience, but then at the last minute, Capcom got cold feet and pushed it out the door as a full-priced $60 title, leading to a disastrous launch. It took years of work on Capcom’s part to shake that reputation and build SFV into a well-liked entry in the series.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to the one fighting game dev which has done a fantastic job with navigating the games market. With their revival of the Mortal Kombat series and the creation of the Injustice Series, NetherRealm Studios 100% committed to that third plan, building a full featured singleplayer experience worth $60 while also building a separate strong online multiplayer component. And they’ve been rewarded for their efforts—according to Wikipedia, Mortal Kombat 11 was the fifth best selling videogame of 2019 and has now sold over 12 million copies.

So why did I like this Street Fighter 6 trailer? There’s a lot to like, but personally, I think the single biggest takeaway is that Capcom picked a direction and committed to it. They’re clearly pouring resources into both the single and multiplayer pieces to truly justify it being a full-priced AAA release. I’m excited to see how it pans out.