Last night at EVO, we had a repeat of last year's performance. Not from the players, but from ESPN. We had them come up on stage and say to the players "Hey, would you mind changing your costume? We can't show this chick's asshole hanging out on national television."
Thus, instead of Kazunoko rocking classic green leotard Cammy for most of top 8, we instead saw the classy alt costume you see above. Last year, a similar incident occurred with a player using R. Mika and being forced to switch to a slightly less revealing outfit. Again, not a huge loss. But it begs the question. What if there wasn't a suitable alt? What if the character in question was Laura, with her boobs hanging out? Would they have let it rock, or would they have actually said "No, you have to switch"?
Shouldn't Capcom and other fighting game developers be getting the message at this point? Their games can't be on TV with women dressed like this or this, but they still keep putting these character designs in their games and making deals for big esports appearances.
This seems to be a problem unique to fighting games, to me at least. MOBAs don't zoom in on the character models enough for any problematic designs to be noticeable, Rocket League doesn't have humans, FPS move so fast as to make focusing on any single character model almost impossible (and only Overwatch has any sexy women for the most part). But stupid sexy women are fighting game culture at this point. They've been there since the beginning. Some franchises are built off of them, like Dead of Alive and numerous smaller anime titles.
It's one thing to have alt costumes be sexy. Those can easily be banned. But Capcom needs to make sure that default costumes are fit for all ages to look at, and they need to make sure that every female character has a least one costume that's OK to look at on TV. That's my idea anyway.
