As a fan of Guilty Gear, I really hate that this game has influenced the direction of fighting games ever since its inception with the changes coming for Strive. Hell, I just hate the idea of games being made with competitive eSports in mind first over your casual audience in the first place. Most of a game's sales are going to come from the casuals that people love to bash much like how 4chan and other parts of the Internet bash normies even though said normies, for better or for worse, are what determine how things play out in the market these days.
Anyone remembers "This time there will be only one version. We promise!"
What a sweet little lie that was.
If this was a game hypothetically made on PC before 2006, with all of the characters, stages, costumes, etc. being free updates, maybe it'd be more believable. Nowadays though?
I know, fighting games always have had a reputation of being glorified updates of what came before, but it gets kind of ridiculous when Under Night in-Birth (what a title, btw) has so many different versions that are, if you can believe it, just as hard to follow as Guilty Gear X2's various update subtitles (at least some of those made sense, what the fuck is Under Night in Birth: ExE Late[st]: cl-r?). I get that making new content takes time and money, and in the case of Street Fighter, the various major versions seemed to be tied to console generations for when they're introduced (SFII being primarily 16-bit systems, Super Street Fighter II Turbo and the Alpha games being most of the 90's with the PS1/DC/SAT and Street Fighter III being late 90's-early 00's on every system DC and afterwards in some form), but it becomes a question of whether to buy the next update now, or wait until the last version to buy the game? That's what I did with Blazblue Central Fiction, as I read that it was essentially the finale (supposedly, Mori is supposed to have a fifth game planned where it's gonna be the MOTW/SF3 Next-Generation-esque game, but this was supposed to be Ragna the Totally-Not-Dante Bloodedge's swan song in the Blazblue storyline, so it's final enough for yours truly, anyways), and it had all of the stages and music from the previous games as well.
What worries yours truly personally is, with how much games-as-a-service seems to be getting more traction among various game devs/publishers, they may get the idea to ditch iterative releases and try to have competing services. For example, you'll have the Street Fighter service competing with the Tekken service which will also be running the Soul Calibur service or something along those lines. I almost wonder why a franchise like Call of Duty hasn't adopted something like this, with having different war modes for those of varying tastes, such as a Modern Warfare theme, alongside WWII and the futuristic shit from the mid-2010's!
SOURCE: GBAtemp Inbox
