It’s wild just how many times this conversation has been brought up. Not just about the current NRS game being dead or not, but how relevant dev support is.
My stance is the same as it has always been, and I’ll try to reiterate it as concisely as I can.
NRS has cultivated a culture where they force the competitive playerbase to lose interest when they stop supporting the game. But, it’s an interesting situation because either both sides hold some blame, or neither side does.
People forget pretty much on a daily basis that NRS is a business first and foremost, above all else. I’m pretty sure that since MK9, NRS games have been the best selling fighting games (aside from the new Smash games… if they count
). And that also, Mortal Kombat alone as a video game franchise is unrivaled in total revenue, even by Smash (not NRS, just MK). For the 5 NRS titles, they have tweaked and fine tuned their business strategy while simultaneously progressively dedicating a lot of time and resources to the competitive community, and doing the same to that and how they balance patch the game.
Whether some would like to admit it or not, the sad truth is that NRS games could have zero focus on the competitive community and any losses that would come from that would most likely be negligible. Sure, the current NRS game DOES do a lot of I guess “self promotion” when it’s super active, alive and well, and a staple part of the FGC tournament circuit. I don’t have the exact numbers to quantify just how much of an impact that has on sales, but if I were to guess, again, I’d assume the number of sales as a result isn’t worth the time (and money) NRS chooses to invest into the competitive community. I am of course not suggesting that NRS is merely treating the competitive community like a charity case, and we should kiss their toes for even trying to make the games balanced competitively and do all the promotion that they DO do for tournaments and the competitive scene and FGC. But, as I said, they don’t “need” us.
So when they go out of their way to do things that don’t really benefit them in a business sense, yeah, I feel like that SHOULD be acknowledged as them doing us a favor. Because it’s quite clear we are incapable of keeping these games alive competitively on our own. Well, we absolutely can, but the way this all works is that players have become so accustomed and spoiled by what NRS gives to the competitive scene in regards to balance patches, tournament pot bonuses, tournament series’, the stream dedicated to more of the competitive minded players, etc, that when all of that is no longer there, we kinda get that feeling that we’re left holding the bag. It’s an interesting dichotomy that I don’t think exists in any other FGC community.
With all that said, and AS I said, yes, we technically COULD keep the newer games alive for as long as we want to. But aside from all of the aforementioned points above, it goes to another point of mine about the quality of the newer NRS games as well as them not (imo) being built to last, especially in comparison to a lot of other FG’s. And the fact that all these points tie in together to creating exactly the same results we see for every new NRS game when the support for the game by NRS stops.
But this post is already long enough and it was supposed to be just a
brief reiteration, lol. And since that other, last point of mine is far more subjective, I’ll leave that for another discussion/topic.
