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MKX was the #1 selling game of 2015, so why so few viewers on Twitch?

evolution07

It's too soon to get cocky.
someone correct me if i'm wrong, but I've always heard that WB games such as MK die out rather quickly after its release and people stop playing the game. I heard about this for MK9 so curious if MKX will eventually die out online within a year from now?
 
The fighting game genre has a niche appeal except for casuals whom buy the game, mash some buttons, do some fatalities on each other and call it a night.
MOBAs appeal to a much much wider audience because you can team up with friends and its relatively easy to learn.

Highest viewed game: League of Legends - Team up with multiple friends/synergy with voice chat + easy to learn
2nd highest viewed game: CS:GO - Team up with friends/synergy with voice chat
3rd highest viewed game: Hearthstone - extremely easy to learn
 

JerzeyReign

PSN: JerzeyReign
Fighting game streams aren't interesting to watch unless you're looking for new strategy. YOMI streams are interesting because you get a variety of characters played and can see something that may spark an idea. I don't find other streams, unless it's a character I'm learning, interesting. Watching someone use one character and bodying online cats isn't that fun to watch for long periods of time.
 

EntropicByDesign

It's all so very confusing.
Disclaimer: Im too tired to format and edit this crap right. Im sorry its a wall of text and full of shit grammar and piss spelling. <3

Ok.

Now that I have a few minutes to type this. I might be over-thinking this, but here is my opinion.

We live in an age where we will spend far more time an energy to shift blame, than we would have expended to accept and remedy the situation in the first place. This has made several generations gun-shy, and excuse-ridden. Fighting games will likely *never* have the enormous audience that MOBA's get, because FGs work contrary to the generally accepted practice of shifting blame. This makes learning a fighting game a daunting task that many, especially younger players, are simply unwilling to undertake. They cant deal with the learning curve and the amount of self-reflection that curve requires.

MOBAs are PERFECT for the excuse-heavy outlook of MANY players. You have 9 other people to blame for a loss besides yourself. I lost lane because top didnt tele down when enemy mid rotated for an early dragon. Our stupid jungler fed the enemy ADC and now I'm getting shit on. I died and got miles behind because when I tried to gank mid-lane our mid-laner was asleep and I died under tower. You only beat me because. because. because. because.

A fighting game leaves you alone and facing your opponent. There is no level advantage, or gold advantage, or curve to get ahead or behind of. Its just you and him/her. Dont get me wrong, we have our fair share of excuses, but all that it really boils down to is a) you're using an OP character or b) you're using a cheap tactic/strategy or c) a combo of the two. That's mostly all we have.
MOBA's have an unlimited number of excuses though. Its SO much easier to play a MOBA and walk away from a loss with a shrug because it COULDN'T have been your fault. It was obviously (insert excuse) that caused that loss. After a loss in a FG, you just have to hold it until next time.

MOBAs are also, currently, the hotness.. Which means each crop of new gamers is coming in to the gaming scene with these dominating the charts and popularity. So their first taste of competitive gaming is the MOBAs. The excuses, the toxicity, the whole MOBA experience shapes their expectations for other competitive games.

FGs function differently on so many levels that the transition is rough and unappealing. FGs also, as I stated, have a pretty brutal learning curve. Even a brand new game thats just as new to you as it is to me, will be EASILY dominated by FG vets from other games, as many of the principles and skill very much transfer over. FG's are far more demanding from a mechanical skill point as well, requiring lab work and solo-practice for various setups and combos and other such things.
Nothing like this exists in the MOBA world. MOBAs are utterly brain-dead to PLAY. Not play well, there is a reason that a VERY small % of players rise through the rankings, there really is enormous skill involved in MOBA play, but its a different skill-set than FGs.

Its also a lot easier to cheat at MOBAs and I think this has an effect. If you doubt me, well, don't doubt me. I have a good RL friend who quite literally makes more money from cheating at LoL (boosting through to gold or higher, or 'moonlighting' in small time online tournaments) than he would from a part time job.
If I cared even the tiniest I could get the programs he uses and auto-level to 30, then run through to about diamond with an 80+% winrate. I haven't seen him do it once, I've seen him do it probably 75+ times. Now, i know cheating can and Im sure does, exist in FGs, but its much different and far harder. The % of 'hackers' in the FG community is microscopic, but in LoL and DotA I would say its very like three or four times worse than people imagine it is.

We, as a species, seem to prefer teams as well. Tennis and Boxing and such are VERY popular, but not nearly so much as team based sports like Soccer, Football and synchronized swimming. So MOBAs being a team game is in their favor as well. The FG community also gives very little respect to purely online warriors. People 'famous' in the FG community are such because of offline tournament results and showings.

This acts as an alienating factor for a lot of players. Young players who certainly cant travel, or players just too busy, or who live in bad locations for offline scenes.. These players may dream, in the back of their minds, of game-based fame and glory, but when its obvious from the outset that unless you're an offline competitor you will get scant give-a-shit from anyone.. it dampens the enthusiasm.

MOBAs also have a TON of money being thrown at them, so the small % of people who are HONESTLY trying to move forward as professional gamers are obviously going to gravitate towards the money and the fame that LoL and DotA provide. I feel like FGs will slowly close this gap however, the whole world has seen what E-Sports is capable of doing and accomplishing and the money it can generate, FGs are poised to be a big damn deal as the foundations of E-Sports are laid. Provided the whole affair doesnt whoopee cushion out, it will continue to grow and FGs with it.

I'm sorry this is so disjointed and a little scatterbrained, I'm exhausted and starving and just don't have the energy to put this together like I would like.. but ultimately, I feel like MOBAs have their massive audiences because they are more accessible than fighting games. That accessibility comes from the factors Ive listed above and it just boils down to them appealing more to the half-assed approach so many poeple seem to have towards everything these days, not just games. Why grind and work and practice when you can mindlessly click a screen and blame losses on the rest of your team?

Evil Canadian said:

I am a little 14 year old boy, do I want to watch league of legends where people make millions and me and all my friends are failing out of school to play, or watch fighting games where I see a bunch of 30 year olds sit on cheap chairs next to a monitor.
In all honesty, this essentially sums my opinions up pretty nicely.
 

HugeMcBigLarge

Retirement my ass
TL;DR: Fighting games take too much time/practice to even play at a competitive level, and it's never quite clear how to level up or what to do next. Also, watching gameplay for the average user is unclear, and they don't necessarily know what is going on. This is not a fun feeling.


I think there are a lot of generalizations being made and not enough emphasis on accessibility and clarity in a game. CS:GO is ridiculously easy to just pick up and play, and it's very clear what you need to do to improve (good zones to play around, which guns are good, etc.) Same can be said of Hearthstone... you look up a deck and play it, and there are very discrete points where you can see where you made the right/wrong play, and at high levels it becomes statistics to predict if they have something in their hand based on pattern of play and knowledge of their deck.

The one big exception to this is the MOBA market; however I would argue it's much more simple than initially thought. You have a hero that levels up and carries items; go kill them. Things you need to be good at are 1) Last hitting (so you get money from neutral monsters) 2) Taking less damage than your lane opponent (harassing and trading cs for damage) and 3) When you group, what should you do/where should you be.


Fighting games have a lot of complexity, and are close to Hearthstone in this gameplay loop. Max dmg combo's are available for everyone and aren't secret. It's more about what tools your opponent has and using yours optimally compared to theirs. Are they a rush down character? Keep em out and zone! Are they playing Quan? Don't get caught and keep him on the floor! However, the individual steps/components of these happen so quickly and there aren't necessarily flow chart decisions that can be made. The game is NOT clear to most except the high level players (because you KNOW EX Hellsparks jail you into another f4 pressure chain), however the general observer will watch and just see one person pushing buttons whereas the other isn't.

To really illustrate the point, watch some of your games/professional games. I always try counting and seeing WHAT it was the person converted off of or what created their openings to understand how people open each other up. Actually count and see what is opening you up; this is what you need to remember and things that you can incrementally fix (watch your footsies game; I can almost promise you that you have some preset poking program: d1, block their counter-poke, you d3, block your opponent's d4, then you jump in, for example). You'll find that high level players actually vary these things and usually aren't caught by the same things, whereas the average player can probably get beat by the same thing over and over because they just play and do what looks right at the time.

This stuff happens at FAR too high of a level to be clear to general users, and most people simply will NOT be able to appreciate the high level of skill good footsies or general high level play entails. How many threads have we all seen go by that say "I know how to do basic combos, but I don't know how to progress further. What do I work on next?" That type of question simply shows how unclear the core gameplay and meta of fighting games are. The complexity itself is not bad (and most games are complex), but the inability to know what to do/WHY someone was better than you and just bodying you over and over is a serious problem.

The second main point is the actual gameplay loop. Playing fighting games is hugely rewarding and probably has higher 'hype' or emotional highs than most other games. However, these are hugely an outlier and are ALWAYS predated by hours and hours in the lab learning spacing and building muscle memory. I would say I've spent as much time fighting a training dummy as I have against other living people. If you don't highly value your fighting game ability, then this gameplay SUCKS. Telling people they need to spend 20 hours alone learning how the game works before they can play at a high level is ridiculous, and something that will prohibit significant growth for any game.
 

Samsara

Resident Cynic
This games not gonna be hype until ESL rolls around again . To be completely honest the game goes stale without updates or new content. It's gonna be pretty dry overall until KP2 and the next major balance patch. At the moment, I've moved on to other games, like DCUO. The games broke as he'll but at least the online functions.
 

Evil Canadian

G O K U
Premium Supporter
Basically don't worry about stream viewers cause its primarily gonna be a young mans market, and fighting games skew older than just about everything short of those paradox games. Remember how you grew up in arcades? Were the old folks now just deal with it and revel in it cause you are bigger than the kids and can whip their asses and take their money and then you can finally show up thsoe fuckcing kids who smoked in teh corner of the arcade and gave you shit all the time fuck you jim
 
It's definitely getting dry for me. I've been playing less and less, and the online shit is not helping matters. I got on a couple days ago and played about 7 matches (went 4/3). I was in my last match and I just put my controller down after I couldn't get Jason's temple punch to come out. My opponent messaged me and asked y I quit. He gave me props on my Jason though lol. I think another reason people aren't watching is because we see a lot of the same characters most of the time.
 

Evil Canadian

G O K U
Premium Supporter
It's definitely getting dry for me. I've been playing less and less, and the online shit is not helping matters. I got on a couple days ago and played about 7 matches (went 4/3). I was in my last match and I just put my controller down after I couldn't get Jason's temple punch to come out. My opponent messaged me and asked y I quit. He gave me props on my Jason though lol. I think another reason people aren't watching is because we see a lot of the same characters most of the time.
People playing has zero to do with people watching! Shitty lets plays of garbage japanese games get a hojillion views on youtube despite 14 english speaking people ever actually playing them.

People don't watch fighting games in any numbers unless its a big event thats how it is, thats how it will always be unless the dark e-sports future actually happens.
 

evolution07

It's too soon to get cocky.
I think online is getting worse. The game will occasionally do random freezing causing combos to be dropped. Throw in some "lost connection attempting to reconnect" every 2-3 seconds and it's sure to cause anyone to stop playing. When anyone with a red bar gets brought into a KOTH match and is fighting the current player, it immediately boots someone, usually me lol.
 
People playing has zero to do with people watching! Shitty lets plays of garbage japanese games get a hojillion views on youtube despite 14 english speaking people ever actually playing them.

People don't watch fighting games in any numbers unless its a big event thats how it is, thats how it will always be unless the dark e-sports future actually happens.
I don't have the facts but I will watch fighters stream over the other stuff. My dude plays LOL and I don't know how anyone gets into that shit. Matter of fact, I'm going to test the sedating effects of matching LOL matches later this am when I get off work.
 
Its either watch the yomi boys go at it for the trillionth time, listen to tom brady bitch about ice clone, or watch people try to get their moves to come out underwater in an online environment that doesn't even have a ranking system. Character/playstyle variety is also a pretty big problem as watching people get mauled in the corner match after match isn't all that interesting.
 

I GOT HANDS

Official Infrared Scorp wid gapless Wi-Fi pressure
This is super one sided thread coming from the usual core MKX / FG fan base who, generally speaking seem to have a very surface level impression of how the rest of the gaming scene works.

I have to laugh at people saying Mobas get more views because they are easier to pick up and/or easier to play at higher level. This couldn't be further from the truth. I know it's popular to think that the game that YOU play is the most in-depth, and the hardest to master, but it's simply not the case in comparison to a game like Dota. I have 3-4 thousand hours of Dota - and I'm sure after just a few hundred hours of MKX im playing it at a higher level. The reason Mobas have more views is because they ARE more in depth than Fighters. Fighters are a very simple platform that gives you an amazing opportunity to test against your opponent, that generally come down to a few core concepts - reactions times, reads, knowledge, and positioning (or footsies/neutral if you will). It's very fast paced and deliberate, I'm definitely a bigger fan of fighters because I prefer this more focused approach. However the appeal to Mobas is definitely the additional layers of gameplay, all that stuff is still up there, except so much more, you have 5 opponents to worry about and 4 teammates to work with, and there is much more to it than constant duelling, you have to worry about farming, pushing, vision, taking the right fights, awareness, resource management, etc. on top of all things you find in fighters being relevant in interactions with your opponents including common fg things like harass, resource management, etc. but with the addition of cooldowns and many more resources to manage and interactables that actually require contesting, ect, the list just goes on. Fighters are just much more simple, nay not simple just more straightforward and much more a test of raw skill rather than all the things a Moba demands, something I MUCH prefer. However the attraction to Mobas most definitely does not stem from a place of "ease".


Disclaimer: Im too tired to format and edit this crap right. Im sorry its a wall of text and full of shit grammar and piss spelling. <3

Ok.

Now that I have a few minutes to type this. I might be over-thinking this, but here is my opinion.

We live in an age where we will spend far more time an energy to shift blame, than we would have expended to accept and remedy the situation in the first place. This has made several generations gun-shy, and excuse-ridden. Fighting games will likely *never* have the enormous audience that MOBA's get, because FGs work contrary to the generally accepted practice of shifting blame. This makes learning a fighting game a daunting task that many, especially younger players, are simply unwilling to undertake. They cant deal with the learning curve and the amount of self-reflection that curve requires.

MOBAs are PERFECT for the excuse-heavy outlook of MANY players. You have 9 other people to blame for a loss besides yourself. I lost lane because top didnt tele down when enemy mid rotated for an early dragon. Our stupid jungler fed the enemy ADC and now I'm getting shit on. I died and got miles behind because when I tried to gank mid-lane our mid-laner was asleep and I died under tower. You only beat me because. because. because. because.

A fighting game leaves you alone and facing your opponent. There is no level advantage, or gold advantage, or curve to get ahead or behind of. Its just you and him/her. Dont get me wrong, we have our fair share of excuses, but all that it really boils down to is a) you're using an OP character or b) you're using a cheap tactic/strategy or c) a combo of the two. That's mostly all we have.
MOBA's have an unlimited number of excuses though. Its SO much easier to play a MOBA and walk away from a loss with a shrug because it COULDN'T have been your fault. It was obviously (insert excuse) that caused that loss. After a loss in a FG, you just have to hold it until next time.

MOBAs are also, currently, the hotness.. Which means each crop of new gamers is coming in to the gaming scene with these dominating the charts and popularity. So their first taste of competitive gaming is the MOBAs. The excuses, the toxicity, the whole MOBA experience shapes their expectations for other competitive games.

FGs function differently on so many levels that the transition is rough and unappealing. FGs also, as I stated, have a pretty brutal learning curve. Even a brand new game thats just as new to you as it is to me, will be EASILY dominated by FG vets from other games, as many of the principles and skill very much transfer over. FG's are far more demanding from a mechanical skill point as well, requiring lab work and solo-practice for various setups and combos and other such things.
Nothing like this exists in the MOBA world. MOBAs are utterly brain-dead to PLAY. Not play well, there is a reason that a VERY small % of players rise through the rankings, there really is enormous skill involved in MOBA play, but its a different skill-set than FGs.

Its also a lot easier to cheat at MOBAs and I think this has an effect. If you doubt me, well, don't doubt me. I have a good RL friend who quite literally makes more money from cheating at LoL (boosting through to gold or higher, or 'moonlighting' in small time online tournaments) than he would from a part time job.
If I cared even the tiniest I could get the programs he uses and auto-level to 30, then run through to about diamond with an 80+% winrate. I haven't seen him do it once, I've seen him do it probably 75+ times. Now, i know cheating can and Im sure does, exist in FGs, but its much different and far harder. The % of 'hackers' in the FG community is microscopic, but in LoL and DotA I would say its very like three or four times worse than people imagine it is.

We, as a species, seem to prefer teams as well. Tennis and Boxing and such are VERY popular, but not nearly so much as team based sports like Soccer, Football and synchronized swimming. So MOBAs being a team game is in their favor as well. The FG community also gives very little respect to purely online warriors. People 'famous' in the FG community are such because of offline tournament results and showings.

This acts as an alienating factor for a lot of players. Young players who certainly cant travel, or players just too busy, or who live in bad locations for offline scenes.. These players may dream, in the back of their minds, of game-based fame and glory, but when its obvious from the outset that unless you're an offline competitor you will get scant give-a-shit from anyone.. it dampens the enthusiasm.

MOBAs also have a TON of money being thrown at them, so the small % of people who are HONESTLY trying to move forward as professional gamers are obviously going to gravitate towards the money and the fame that LoL and DotA provide. I feel like FGs will slowly close this gap however, the whole world has seen what E-Sports is capable of doing and accomplishing and the money it can generate, FGs are poised to be a big damn deal as the foundations of E-Sports are laid. Provided the whole affair doesnt whoopee cushion out, it will continue to grow and FGs with it.

I'm sorry this is so disjointed and a little scatterbrained, I'm exhausted and starving and just don't have the energy to put this together like I would like.. but ultimately, I feel like MOBAs have their massive audiences because they are more accessible than fighting games. That accessibility comes from the factors Ive listed above and it just boils down to them appealing more to the half-assed approach so many poeple seem to have towards everything these days, not just games. Why grind and work and practice when you can mindlessly click a screen and blame losses on the rest of your team?



In all honesty, this essentially sums my opinions up pretty nicely.
You're a smart guy Entropic and usually on point, and I'm not targeting you because many people seem to be sharing similar sentiments, so I'm just gonna quote your post so I can talk about my perspective on this sort of opinion - and that is, I don't think you could be more wrong. Starcraft2 for example is for the majority of it, 1v1. It has more than 10x the viewers MKX has right now. That game is so much more balanced than MKX and has nowhere near the amount of excuses possible. It's also SHITTONS harder to play at both entry and competitive level. This just seems like a reach, "Mobas caters to video game players inability to recognise/admit their failings" ok I can see the draw to that, but to attribute the games success on that aspect almost entirely is just a cop out and being unwilling to recognise the nature of something yourself, which is the actual REASONING as to why a different game is more popular than your own favourite . MKX has a world of excuses built into it anyway.



Mobas don't just have a bigger prize pool because they are big bad top tier Mobas. They came up from nothing like everything else, and have only had a few years to gather their popularity, while fighters have been around for 30-40 years. The fact is, Mobas have a bigger showing than a game like MKX because THEY SUPPORT IT. MKX was the best selling game of the year and yet you have to cycle through pages on pages of twitch just to find the game, there is some seriously Indy shit with more viewers than MKX. You simply cannot completely SHIT on the Internet community so hard with the NetCode the way it is and expect there to be a following, people can't get in to WATCHING people play the game online, because they can't get into PLAYING the game online, there is simply no eagerness to replicate or study or even ability to appreciate the skill from some of the better streamers, even AVAILABLE to the majority of people purchasing this game because without a NetCode competitive play simply doesn't exist for them. How many Dota players do you think got into the competitive nature of the game by going to live events first, and not by just clicking the "find a match" button? Stuff like that is an after effect of online popularity, not a necessity for these established games in 2025


The developers of Mobas sunk good percentages of their own earnings into fostering the competitive scene, and this is how prize money grew to the point it's at today for them, they nurtured their scene with what they could. They didn't just overnight go to being featured on ESPN with 12mil prize pools. Yet you have NRS/WB, literally a BILLION dollar entity, with the absolute minimum invested into their scene. What they have contributed to the prize pool of some events isn't even a fraction of a percentage of the earnings they've made off the DLC of their most recent release alone. There is also the fact that other games devs care much more attention to the state of the game itself, patch days are eagerly awaited amongst eSport communities because they can count on their devs to tweak out the issues with the game for the most part. Compared to TYM, where there is like a hundred page thread debating whether or not patches are even beneficial to the game. The kind of fuck up like the Quan Chi buffs in the last patch, not to mention the seemingly random doled out nerfs to Mileena, but the Quan Chi changes alone, I've literally never seen a patch day fuck up of such epic proportions from any game.





But back on the subject of prize money, here's a post I made a bit back, after doing some research on the matter:

There is like 5 people max possibly even eligible to have the title pro MKX player.

More likely just 1 tho. Winning a prize once doesn't make it a profession.

To put it in perspective, Starcraft 2, a "dead" eSport, has players with more individual earning from this year alone, than the ENTIRE prize pool from every single tournament globally in the history of MKX



Can you think of many eSports? I Sat down and thought about it, and came up with like 10 at best, and I wasn't even sure bout some of them. MKX is #46 on the list of total prize payouts for competitive gaming. MK9 ain't even top 50. Now sure, we can say "well it's early days" but there are other 2015 titles much higher on that list. Hell, we lost by more than half again to a game called Turbo Racing League, a game with only 4 known competitive players.

Shit is embarassing, we lost to a fucking PHONE APP that I've never heard of in terms of competitive tournament prize payouts, and yet we still have people saying we shouldn't put the heat on Ed Boon at public events about the NetCode he scammed everyone for, because he might pull out from the competitive scene - his investment is fuckin minima anyway, we have phone app tournaments worth more than the entire prize pool of every MKX tournament in history. They are a billion dollar company. MKX is the best selling game of 2015. Stop sucking Eds dick for the definitive scraps he strings you along with, this "competitive" community is absolutely pathetic
If NRS/WB had supported this game from the jump, maybe we wouldn't just be a blip on the radar, a community pathetic in size and following to even other mid-range eSport. The potential and hype was there, we the number one selling game of the year. All this shit about Mobas being easier to play (lol), gaming "blame culture" (ironic), other eSports having larger prizepools (not a coincidence), are all a cop-out for the fact that NRS did relatively nothing to foster competitively play and just about everything they shouldn't with balance and online play. Lying about it to trick people was just the sloppy follow up to the dump they'd already taken on the title of "eSport". This game was released way too untested and months in the are still so incredibly off the mark to make such blunders as the last patch.


Just my opinion guys, and sorry if it came off aggressive, I feel strongly about the issue and about the squandering of incredible opportunity from a publishing giant who just look for a quick buck and the short term sales, as well as the simps in the playerbase who apologise and make excuses for them because they fanboy. FYI you hurt the game you love more than you help it by fanboying shit like the NetCode and defending it, same way if a parent lets their child get a way with everything because they love them so much hurts them more than it helps in the big picture.


EDIT: that's in no way directed at you @EntropicByDesign , as I know you said nothing of the sort, my post sort of trailed off from a response to you, into just generally talking about the issue
 
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buyacushun

Normalize grab immunity.
I think everything been said.

Overall:
Fighting games are pretty hard to get in to. The genre JUST started having tutorials that go more in depth besides d,df,f+p = fireball. And that's not even every game.

MOBA devs have done more for their scene. FG have just started getting consistent pot bonuses and tourney help from devs.

I'd say give this genre a few more years to really get big in the esports scene. Qe're finally laying down the foundation.

As for MKX:
Netcode is garbage. All the casuals who had even a fleeting interest in the game won't put up with the awful online support. They have way too many other games to play online.

MKX is NOT a casual friendly game. You can't make a super offensive based game and expect to get big numbers or for interest to stay. I'd say this game is right beneath Marvel in terms of being unforgiving. But instead of ToDs, you get put into a guessing game (that you probably didn't even know about), and lose 60%. I mean how many tourney matches does the timer go past 60 seconds?.

Basically not only is the fighting game genre finally make steps to getting out of it's niche that it won't ever fully shake off. But MKX and NRS have their own slew of problems on top of that.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if ESL 2 had less numbers. ESL 1 happened during release hype. Now everyone has a clear picture of what type of game MKX is.

Can anyone tell me what kind of marketing do the ESL people do? I always felt like there is HUGE number of people who own MKX and don't even know that's going on. If they don't visit websites like TYM, Ehubs, Srk, or twitch, or follow FG personalities on twitter, they wouldn't know about it.