DjangoReinhardt said:
It depends on your perspective. A big part of the reason why the quality of play in professional sports is so high is because the rules aren't wildly overhauled every couple of years like they are in fighting games. Athletes are generally able to refine their skills without fear of them being rendered irrelevant overnight.
Publishers have a vested economic interest in creating new product for the sake of creating new product.
I understand this, yeah. Thing is, fighting games aren't all one game; unlike Baseball, say, there are many different variations of the same theme with their own rules. A fighting game "athlete" is a bit more subdivided and specialized than someone who plays a sport where there's only one official form of the game.
And that can be a strength, I'd say... it means that fighting games CAN experiment without destroying the sport (if you want to call it that). People have turned games like Third Strike into enough of a regulated sport.
What gets me is the sheer scorn and derision (let's call it the Smash Reaction) to any fighting game that appears and doesn't explicitly follow a set of invisible rules people have made up. A lot of people seem to react not just with "this doesn't interest me"... or even disappointment. Goes way beyond disappointment. Fighting game players are interesting in that they seem to feel they have ownership of the genre and approval over what even gets called a "fighting game".
I know some gamers like that in other genres; I've seen a few people who will insist that all racing games should be Gran Turismo and anything that isn't "serious" like it may as well not even exist. Most of the time, they seem a minority who get laughed at or ignored. In the FGC though, that attitude seems a lot more common, possibly even dominant.
