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Why do NRS games die?

Juggs

Lose without excuses
Lead Moderator
This question has been brought up a lot lately and throughout the years. And there's several factors that I believe contribute to NRS games life cycle being relatively short.

1. The NRS business model.

There's some people who refuse to "blame" NRS for the games dying out, but they are a contributing factor. And it's not that NRS actively tries to kill a game, it just happens based on their business model.

NRS patches their games early and often, basically "using up" all their patches fairly quickly. Some like this, a lot don't. It's one of most common complaints from within the NRS only crowd and the NRS players that play other games. In fact a lot of the players from other communities attribute the 'patch earl and often' method as the primary reason they lose interest. It makes perfect sense though, business wise, why they do this. By far their largest market are casuals. Casuals play the game a MAX of about 6 months, usually far less, before they move on to another game. So to keep them playing and getting their casual scrublord friends to play, they come out with patches early and often. Like I said, the competitive community is split on this method. Although I've seen more against it than for it.

Competitive wise, it would be much more beneficial to spread the patches out. Say FOR EXAMPLE they were going to patch the game 10 times max. Instead of patching 10 times in 2 years, they made balance patches once a year or twice a year. That's 5 or 10 years of supporting the life span of the game. Of course, no one expects a company like NRS to continue supporting a game for 10 years, but 5 certainly doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

That said, business wise it makes almost zero sense. As I said, we make up such a tiny percentage of the market, and casuals would have given the game up so long ago, extending the life span of game in NRS's eyes is basically charity.

So, while stretching out the patches would benefit the competitive community, it's probably not going to ever happen. NRS is a business, people tend to forget that.



2. The business method creates a standard.

Since NRS patches early and often, that's what we all are used to and expect. We expect the game to change all the time, whether the balances changes are warranted or not. They create that standard of constantly having to relearn match-ups and new characters.

Once all the patching stops, and NRS stops supporting the game to work on their new title, that's when the game really starts dying off. We are so used to relying on NRS to keep our games alive, that when they move on, we do too. With no hope of future changes, we are basically "stuck" with the current game. Some people don't mind this, but the point is a lot of people simply get bored because they are used to the standard. The standard of the game changing constantly.



3. New Game HYPE!

Of course another reason our games die out is because of the new game hype. NRS has stopped supporting the current title and are working and promoting the new one, and they're prettu good at hyping up their new games. So more and more people lose interest in the current title, as the new game hype overshadows it. This tied in with the aforementioned factors, no one should be too surprised our games don't last.



4. "THIS COMMUNITY"

The community does play a role in games dying, but my point in this thread is that it's not ONLY the communities fault.

But if we all traveled and took the current game seriously, the game wouldn't die. But by the time NRS stops supporting the game, we aren't getting any new players at that point. So you're essentially seeing the same people place at tournaments. Until some of them quit then the next tier of players rise up. Until they quit and then rinse and repeat. At that point it comes down to passion. But it all ties in together. NRS games aren't built to last a long time, it's ingrained into the core of the game. They aren't trying to make a masterpiece that lasts for decades, just something people will buy and enjoy for a couple of years. This creates a lack of passion for the game itself.


So, can we make a game last longer than 2.5 years and have it thriving? Technically yes, but when all these factors are put in place, I doubt that will ever happen. Just like I doubt we will ever be able to play 2 games at once. We are trained to only play the new game for 2 years, then move on. The vicious NRS cycle is just something we have to accept... until a game comes along where we choose not to accept it.

And that's exactly the game I've been waiting for.

This is just how I feel about it. I would love to hear what y'all think contributes to the death of our games? Do you agree? Disagree? Have other things to add? Let me know, this subject comes up a lot but I don't remember it really being thoroughly discussed or talked about.
 
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NSR

Also known as Futuretime23
You should add it's WB's own fault as well in point 1.
I wouldn't doubt they have something to do with executive decisions such as how long to support a game, which platforms it gets released (like the MKX PC fiasco) for example. Don't forget, WB owns MK and Injustice and in this day and age, the video game industry (specifically, AAA games) are led by publishers more so than developers.
 

HateMe!

Noob
I'm gonna repeat myself, but I think the main problem is that their games still make a shitton of money regardless of how buggy and half-assed they are. People can rant all they won't, but it worked for NRS so far, so why would they change that?

If you want a well-made, competitive fighter just... Play something else I guess?
 

AK L0rdoftheFLY

I hatelove this game
They had their first watch Tower stream the very same day they were announcing the games for EVO.

Either they had no idea and didn't care, (Unlikely) or they did it on purpose because they wanted to purposely shift the focus to injustice. We will never know which is true but the fact that it was on the same day did in fact boost injustice hype while simultaneously killing MKX hype.
 

Spooky Deadeye

Project-6 β
1 - Cancerous community (Not us tho)
2 - Buggy releases.
3 - God awful PC imports
4 - Patching the game when some things shouldn't even be patched. They should have been fix before release.
5 - Mk9 netcode still needs patching.
6 - Injustice 1 could still use a better soundtrack.
7 - Boon's eyebrows.
 

Tanno

The Fantasy is the Reality of the Mind
It's clearly WB's fault. As publishers, they don't know shit about the games and their communities. Only the creators know about them. The world we're in is a messed one. This ought to be the creator's decision about the fate of the games, not the publishers. I hope to see a "Fuck You" sign towards the publishers from the other creators, like Kojima Productions did. Even if I was a creator myself, I would NEVER ever give the rights to the publishers. Every creator know the basic marketing stuff nowadays, so who needs the publishers? I heard some interesting and bad stories from some indie devs about the publishers like Microsoft, Sony, etc.
 

KingHippo

Alternative-Fact Checker
I think a big part is that mechanically, they get better and better. Like I may not have liked the way MKX played, so I didn't play it, but I can't doubt that it's a a bigger and better package than what Injustice offered. Better graphics, more robust and varied modes in single player, and even the gameplay is a little bit crisper and more responsive than Injustice was.

You'll find this is common in many communities, where they just move on to the next game many times unless a new one comes out. You'll always have the super diehards who are still playing the older games, but when, say, Tekken Tag 2 came out, no one was going to go back to Tekken 6. SFIV is completely dead, each earlier version of Blazblue or GG goes out too.

Now, the other big thing is that I think the community that goes to tournaments is still a bit too small to really survive a cannibalization. Like Marvel and SF have such long and established legacies that both games are okay when the herds thin out and only the die-hards are left. This is a problem with the NRS community, but it keeps growing, so I think over time it will work itself out.

It will be interesting to see if I2 becomes a turning point where they stop trying to reinvent the wheel ever game and release legacy titles more often. I don't think it's flawed to be extra creative consistently, but it does, again, force that cannibalization simply because the community isn't big enough with a big enough legacy to support both titles concurrently.

One thing I think people forget is that NRS is a AAA studio that makes AAA sales on their games, so the time and money they get to make these games means that moving on to the new and biggest thing is a lot easier, and probably more interesting process, then going back to the same old. It works too; MKX was one of the best selling games of 2015, whereas SFV has been a critical and commercial flop, moving 0.1 million sales through all of 2016.
 
Would you like to play 50/50 Kombat for 4+ years
sf4 had a great run
But the god honest truth is NRS doesn't care they made money off of the game time for them to move on
Capcom did a great job keeping people interested for SF4 making like 1 patch per year Super SF4, then arade edition, then ultra, then ps4 port, NRS could have done a MK9 remastered edition for ps4, and have done lots of money for it, adding some new skins, a final balance patch, and removing the resets and bugs, but well, they didnt.
 
I think this one is fairly simple to answer:

NRS games die because they say so.

When they stop updating or giving any kind of assistance, they decide it's time to let it go. Usually because of another release.

See the Injustice mobile game for example: it still has a lot of content and events, even though it's been years of its release. They don't want it to die (I dunno if there's a second game on the way), so they keep making the players coming back.

Does that make sense to you guys?
 

FinalBoss_FGC

Day -4MONTHS Dual Jin main
The glaring issue is that Injustice and MK play so similarly.

Marvel and Street Fighter can exist at the same time because they play DRASTICALLY different from one another. What draws one person in, could detract others...MK and Inj are too similar for that to happen...

Combos, inputs, movement...even with the inclusion of the run mechanic, the game still didn't feel drastically different because it most became a type of playstyle or combo extendee opposed to a new tactic universally used to change the meta..

With all that said, the reason Injustice and MK can't exist cohesive is..well, two things..one - TOs don't want to make the room for the two games...two - MK and Injustice are too similar for them both to be largely recognized as a key game in the FGC.
 

FinalBoss_FGC

Day -4MONTHS Dual Jin main
I think this one is fairly simple to answer:

NRS games die because they say so.

When they stop updating or giving any kind of assistance, they decide it's time to let it go. Usually because of another release.

See the Injustice mobile game for example: it still has a lot of content and events, even though it's been years of its release. They don't want it to die (I dunno if there's a second game on the way), so they keep making the players coming back.

Does that make sense to you guys?
Marvel hasn't been supported in forever...
 

MKB

Forum General Emeritus
The community's lack of support once a new game launches. It's no different than when a new Madden, COD, etc launches every year. People don't want to be left behind so they gravitate to the newest edition to the series, regardless of how good or bad it is.
 

Juggs

Lose without excuses
Lead Moderator
They die because people would rather wax philosophical about why they die on TYM than actually travel for them.
Indeed. I'd rather make 100 more posts like this than travel 5 mins for MKX. The purpose is to understand why. The reasons I believe are in the OP.

No one is going to travel for a game they don't want to play.