You're simultaneously telling me that FS must've done poorly because VF6 hasn't been announced and that all the money SEGA has been pouring into VF5FS is just "smart use of marketing dollars". Let me ask you, how much money has SoA spent marketing Anarchy Reigns this year? Do you think it would be a smart use of marketing money to spend as much on AR in 2014 as SEGA has spent marketing VF5FS this year?
Well, I would guess that Sega hasn't spent any money marketing Anarchy Reigns this year. And no, I don't think it would be smart to spend the same amount of money on AR as they have on FS this year either. However, I don't think AR's and FS's situations are quite the same. It seemed to me that Sega of America was clearly trying to support FS among the fighting game community in the same way that companies like Capcom or Namco do. It makes sense to me that these days, with how popular the fighting game scene is in the US, Sega of America would support the VF community for a couple years after FS's release on consoles by sponsoring some tournaments to keep interest in the game among fans and therefore try to get FS more popular in the FGC as a whole. I would guess that Anarchy Reigns doesn't have a community anywhere near as large or as passionate as the FGC is, so it wouldn't make much sense for Sega to promote it a years after its release like they did with FS.
Also, I don't see why FS not being as successful in arcades as Tekken 6/Tag 2 or other fighters and Sega of America trying to support the console version are necessarily contradictory. It makes sense to me that Sega would want to promote the console version, regardless of how the arcade version did overall when compared to other fighters, if the console version was pretty successful by itself. I thought that with events like Sega Cup, Sega of America was just
finally being smart about trying to get VF more popular outside of Japan and to also try to boost the series' overall success in hopes of getting enough support to possibly make VF6.
I also just want to say that I'm sorry If I sound totally naive about all of this. My impression of the VF series and it's success lately comes from watching the series very closely as a hardcore fan over the past 6-7 years. But maybe things that I thought were signs of VF's drop in popularity in arcades over the years weren't actually what I thought they were. Again, I really hope that I'm wrong about all of this, and that FS was truly a big success in arcades against rivals like Tekken.
