I don't dislike KI itself; the game is pretty fun from the little I played of it and the mechanics seem rather solid.
HOWEVER, it does have a gigantic flaw: The way they released this game was terrible.
Allow me to explain...
KI is a launch title for the most expensive console generation to date. In essence, to play KI3 you first have to buy a $500 console. After that you have to spend between $5 and $40.00 on the game. Then if you're like me and prefer to play fighting games on a stick, you need to buy a $200 arcade stick that works on the XBONE. In essence, if I wanted to play KI competitively, I would need to first spend over $700, and for someone like me who has not seen anything else on XBONE that would warrant me buying one, that is not worth the price.
This unfortunately leads to a bigger problem: I am not alone.
My locals tend to get between 15-20 people for Injustice, 30-50 for Capcom games, roughly 30-ish for Tekken and about 10-20 for Vampire Savior (Arcade Legacy is pretty much the only place around that still plays that game I think, but we're damn good at it.).
When the Arcade got a XBONE and a full copy of Killer Instinct, we were all messing with it. When we tried to hold a tournament for it, 6 people entered. Of those 6, 4 of us did not own the game and only entered because the two guys that did own the game wanted us to get into it and for a dollar or two we thought why not?
Now I'd say total, we had close to 40 people who enjoyed the game, but it didn't matter since only two people went out and bought an XBONE for it and only one bought the arcade stick too.
I imagine it's the more or less the same all over the country, and that is going to severely hurt the game. It will be much harder to jump into the game after the metagame has already been established.
This, combined with the pay-as-we-make-it model also brings about another problem:
You only get one chance at a first impression, and the FGC tends not to be very forgiving, especially if a new game comes out before your game gets it's shit together.
Look at games like Skullgirls and SFxT. I keep hearing that since getting patched those games are great, but who cares other than the 5 people still playing those games? Those games died out since they had some issues and/or a lack of content and by the time they had fixed that, something new had come out.
To a certain extent Injustice had this problem as well. While we did manage to keep a strong following due to the fact this game was pretty solid when it was released, it did have some fairly blatant balance issues at launch and it got booed the first time it appeared on the world stage.
I can't speak for all regions, but I know locally we lost a fair number of good players (Including a guy who was bodying all of us for free with Lex for the first month or so!) due to issues that have since been addressed with the patches, but it's too late. Once a player moves to another game, it's usually over.
Unfortunately, with how they are doing KI, this is almost guaranteed to happen to it too.
So yeah, the issue with KI isn't the game itself; the game is solid. The problem is that the game was sold as an unfinished product and tried to emulate the MOBA style of play without paying attention to how long it took for that format to work or that the cost of the game is effectively over $700.
If a new fighting game comes out for any console before the game gets content AND the XBONE gets a massive price drop AND cheaper arcade sticks appear for the XBONE, then it is almost guaranteed to die.
And now for a bonus history lesson and stopping a protest before it begins:
Warning: Feel free to skip this if you don't care about the comparison between the "F2P, pay to unlock content" KI is doing and the one MOBAs have been employing.
"But Fromundaman" you might say, "MOBAs have proven that the pay-for-content-as-we-release-it format works!".
That is true, but let's look at MOBA's origins really fast shall we? (This is based on my recollection and I didn't play the DOTA offshoot like Outlands maps and such, so will focus on Allstars and it's direct predecessors).
While Tides of Blood was the first MOBA type game (More on that in a minute), DOTA is the one that created a market for MOBAs in the first place.
DOTA was a custom game on a widely popular game on a platform that everyone already owned. This means that if you'd bought Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, you got DOTA for free. In this case it would be kind of like getting KI3 for free when you bought Injustice on current gen consoles.
Secondly, when DOTA came out, it already had more content (Heroes) than it's closest competitor Tides of Blood. Now while Tides of Blood introduced the idea of the traditional trilane MOBAs, it was limited to I believe it was 16-20 heroes total by the end of it's life. It was however rather popular for a custom map and built on the foundations Aeons of Strife had laid before it, but had a unique spin on it that was vastly more fun and strategic.
By contrast, I believe DOTA had somewhere between 20 and 30 heroes at launch (I could be wrong; this is based on memory) although several of them were based on or exact clones of existing Warcraft 3 heroes (While they have changed, some more than others, since that time, examples of this would be Medusa, Pandaren Brewmaster, Omniknight, Beastmaster, Abbadon, Sven, etc). The fact it had more content than other competitors though and the changes to some of the mechanics Tides of Blood had made it extremely popular.
I could be wrong but I think DOTA was also the 1st MOBA to use recipes.
Basically my point is that DOTA made a VERY strong first impression when it was first released in 2004, and it continues to get updated to this day (Both DOTA 1 and 2).
I am going to skip Heroes of Newerth since that game has become pretty much irrelevant now.
In 2009, League of Legends appeared. This game made sure to advertise the fact that several of the original creators of DOTA Allstars were on their creative team and were building an entire new engine to go beyond the limitations of Warcraft 3's modding tools.
I believe they also started with a respectable amount of heroes, copying a few of DOTAs to add content (Could be wrong about this since I didn't play LoL, but it is what HoN did and it worked.). Since this was essentially marketing a "new" Dota-like game to the general public using DOTA's influence at the time with a promise of improving it now that they had the tools to do so, it exploded. The rest is history, but when LoL launched, it was already a complete game that just added on content and features as it went and most importantly, it had next to no competition since DOTA required you to own a copy (Or CD Key...) of WC3: The Frozen Throne.
On a side note, when DOTA 2 hit steam, it was already a complete game despite being labeled as a "beta", and cost $30 for everything, including the "early access". It still had a good number of the original DOTA heroes and had a lot of more convenient features, like a matchmaking system and the ability to find and watch matches from your game menu, all of which the original DOTA didn't have. It basically made itself the only relevant competitor to LoL, but despite DOTA's name and influence, LoL made such a strong first impression that the game it marketed itself as being based on has become the less popular of the two.
Now that you know all of this, let's compare it to KI3.
-KI3 has less content than ALL of it's competition. Even Skullgirls has more characters at the moment.
-KI is on a less convenient and more expensive platform, the very thing that made DOTA fall to LoL, except in this case instead of needing to buy a $20-$50 game (Depending on when you bought it), you need to buy a $500 console, and if you play a certain way you have to tack on another $200.
-MOBAs came about based on years of credibility built by DOTA leagues and such and someone finally going "Oh shit, people are willing to pay Blizzard to pay a game we made. We should make money off of this instead!". KI3 came about based on the Nostalgia factor of a popular game that has been dead for well over a decade and the need to sell next gen consoles.
To put this into context, MOBAs built a new engine to profit off of the immense demand for a game/genre. KI was built to try and create demand for a new console.
.... Damn I put more time into this than it really warranted...
