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Why is competitive SSB a "vocal minority" but competitive SF a "core audience"?

percentage of audience, I'd think. Maybe perception.

To me, smash is a game to goof with my friends with 8 players, full items and map rotation on random

same with every person I've ever played smash with. We acknowledge Smash as a competitive game, we just don't play it like one. No care is given to the competitive scene.

Street Fighter is taken much more seriously. Competitive scene isn't something we're going to reach but it's something we'll discuss and pretend we're aspiring towards.

So when I discuss either of these 2 games, they're under those qualifications.

I would not be surprised if that's the general perception of both games. obviously smash players are going to be skewed to their game, but general audience is gonna see a game with pikachu and mario and think it's a fun nintendo game before they think of it's impact to esports




Pikachu and Ryu are in the same amount of games at EVO.

Pokken is at evo 2016 so technically there's more pikachu than ryu this year
 
Smash is a game that at its core has a lot more it needs to do. Not only does it have to be a fun head to head fighter, it also has to be fun to play in 4 player. Or 2v2s. It has to have lots of unique items that work. It needs dynamic stages that represent a wide variety of franchises. Sure, you could argue maybe that nintendo should make a good 1v1 fighter first and treat that stuff as secondary, but the reality is most people (though I think it is changing a bit now that competitive smash is more well known) still play smash 4 player with items. The competitive aspect is secondary, though with For glory and Omega stages I'd say Smash 4 was the closest nintendo has gone to making it more designed for 1v1 no items neutral stages.

Street fighter has none of that to consider. There is more or less one way to play Street Fighter and so there's really only one way to balance it. By design Street Fighter is the most no nonsense fighting game around... It's designed 100% to be competitive for 1 v 1. Sure newcomers can still have fun, but that's not the point.
 
cause people are dumb

there are more competitive smash players than competitive street fighter players, and comparing the copies sold between mainline street fighter entries and smash games are very close.

i'm sure street fighter v will outsell smash 4, yet the smash 4 competitive community will be larger than street fighter's.
 
Might have something to do with how bad Nintendo historically was at fostering its community in general, and its competitive community especially.
 
The series are almost identical in sales numbers

Smash has around 38 million as of december 2015 and street figher has 38 million as of december 2015 but I still would say that Street fighters competitive scene is larger than smash brothers but smash brothers has a large competitive scene.
 
Like others have said, a much larger proportion of SF fans are into the competitive scene than Smash fans.

The competitive scene for Smash is growing, but it's still a small fraction of the overall fanbase.
 
Hilariously, Final Destination isn't Fox's best (legal) stage. That would be Pokemon Stadium.


Including ports and updated versions, Street Fighter II probably holds that crown.
Looking it up, there is a bit more, but the comprison ignores that for many editions the crossover would probably be very high, and there are a number of versions
 
cause people are dumb

there are more competitive smash players than competitive street fighter players, and comparing the copies sold between mainline street fighter entries and smash games are very close.

i'm sure street fighter v will outsell smash 4, yet the smash 4 competitive community will be larger than street fighter's.
Considering how crazy Smash 4's sales have been on 3DS, I doubt it.
 
Competitive players are a vocal minority in any game.

Capcom keeping Street Fighter popular in e-sports is a more important advertisement than it is to Nintendo and Smash.

Couldn't agree more with this fact. SF is designed differently than Smash in terms of audience its catering.
 
Entrants for Melee and Smash 4 for last year's EVO tell the true story. Or the size of tournaments like Apex, Genesis or Big House 5.

Competitive Smash being bigger than any other right now is the elephant in the room whose existence the old guard refuses to accept.
The question is not which scene is bigger, it's which scene represents a larger portion of the game's audience

As previously mentioned in the thread, competitive SSB was born out of players changing the rules to something the developers hadn't intended. Competitive SF is born out of players digging into mechanics within the set rules

I do seriously think people are underestimating the power of streaming/tournaments on getting people's interest right now though for SF. We'll see how it pans out as they finish adding content over the next few months
 
Street Fighter is designed to be competitive at high levels of play.

Smash Bros is not designed and balanced around 1v1 play with large amounts of the content kept out of reach. Smash is designed to be played with all the characters, with items on, with 4 people, and on all sorts of wacky stages. Straying from Sakurai's golden vision means YMMV, and the Smash community does its best to deal with that.
 
I tend to think that the casual audience is actually more important for both.
They are or at least I think they are the reason that games like Smash and MKX can get the budget to pump those production values and DLC characters like Cloud or the Xenomorph respectively.

It's funny but I also always played a LOT of Street Fighter (mostly the Alpha games) casually only to see the character interactions and the endings of each one =P
 
Also does Nintendo run officially sanctioned Smash Tourneys? I remember they were hesitant to smash even being streamed at evo at first, which kinda shows their priorities regardless of Smash competitive scene

CapCom takes SF more seriously as a competitive game, even running their own official tourneys for the game. When SF4 launched, they partnered with gamestop to run local tourneys that lead to regionals/states/etc for evo. I dont remember Nintendo doing anything like that

No they are in 3 games each.
Pikachu - Melee, Smash Wii U and Pokken
Ryu - MvC3, SFV and Smash Wii U.
Unless you are counting Pokken as two

Honestly, forgot Ryu was in Smash. that game is nuts.

I'll say I was counting pokken as two though so I can still be right
 
you'd be wrong as ryu is in smash.
Both Ryu and Pikachu show up in three games, but there are two separate Pikachu characters in Pokken so technically Pikachu appears the most.

Mewtwo also will be in three games and have two versions in Pokken, so I guess he's tied with Pikachu.
 
cause people are dumb

there are more competitive smash players than competitive street fighter players, and comparing the copies sold between mainline street fighter entries and smash games are very close.

i'm sure street fighter v will outsell smash 4, yet the smash 4 competitive community will be larger than street fighter's.
This is only true if you compound the Melee and smash 4 communities though which are largely separate
 
cause people are dumb

there are more competitive smash players than competitive street fighter players, and comparing the copies sold between mainline street fighter entries and smash games are very close.

i'm sure street fighter v will outsell smash 4, yet the smash 4 competitive community will be larger than street fighter's.
SFv will not even come close to smash sales number. It will not even sell 20% of what MK and smash sold. The verdict is out by people. This game will fail badly financially.
 
SF has a huge amount of competitive players relative to its install base

Smash has a relatively small amount of competitive players compared to its massive install base.

Simple
 
I think it would be wrong to say Street Fighter was always purely aimed at being a multiplayer competitive game. Standard arcade mode may seem basic now but people liked playing through it and seeing the endings.

In the original SF2 the 4 bosses weren't even playable at all so why did they even spend the effort on them if the game was meant from the start purely as a multiplayer competitive thing.

The competive multiplayer was something they built on with the initial release of SF2. It was a feature that was popular in the US but took a while to take off in Japan.

The bosses being playable wasn't even something the developers thought people wanted, it was requested from the US branch.
 
Also does Nintendo run officially sanctioned Smash Tourneys? I remember they were hesitant to smash even being streamed at evo at first, which kinda shows their priorities regardless of Smash competitive scene
Unless you include Nintendo World Championships, than nope.
They support other tournaments, but don't have their own thing.

The only game Nintendo did their own series for was Splatoon.
Pokémon is done by Pokémon, not Nintendo directly.
 
Also does Nintendo run officially sanctioned Smash Tourneys? I remember they were hesitant to smash even being streamed at evo at first, which kinda shows their priorities regardless of Smash competitive scene

CapCom takes SF more seriously as a competitive game, even running their own official tourneys for the game. When SF4 launched, they partnered with gamestop to run local tourneys that lead to regionals/states/etc for evo. I dont remember Nintendo doing anything like that



Honestly, forgot Ryu was in Smash. that game is nuts.

I'll say I was counting pokken as two though so I can still be right

Other than their E3 invitational, which had items (LOL), nope.

Pokken has the The Pokemon Company backing it so it gets better support officially.
 
Also does Nintendo run officially sanctioned Smash Tourneys? I remember they were hesitant to smash even being streamed at evo at first, which kinda shows their priorities regardless of Smash competitive scene
They ran a tournament at E3 a couple years back and have since started sponsoring more major events.
 
i'm sure street fighter v will outsell smash 4, yet the smash 4 competitive community will be larger than street fighter's.

SF5 outselling Smash 4? I don't see that happening, even if SF5 has Super and Ultra editions down the line. That's not a slight against SF5, but Smash 4 combined is already near Brawl's huge LTD sales numbers, and will continue to sell for a few more years. That's just a huge baseline for SF5 to reach.
 
The latest two entries in the series sold more than any version of Street Fighter ever.

It's not a fair way to compare.

- The sales that the Wii had are the most important reason that all the Nintendo games made ridiculous numbers.
- 3ds & Wii U Smash came with no competition to both markets (3ds also beeing THE device in Japan).
- SFIV came in when fighting games were almost dead (mainstream). Also in a ridiculous time with Batman, ACII, CoD:MW2, Resident Evil 5, Uncharted 2, Bonderlands, Left 4 Dead 2, Dragon Age Origin.
- Don't think I have to say what happened with SFIII and the time it was.
- SF still sold 7M (according to Capcom) besides the fact that was bigger in the arcades


The problem with SF it's that it's not a party game like smash. I'm sure everybody has a friend that likes the game but doesn't buy it cuz "I suck at FG". Not saying it could surpass Smash in sales, but if it was as easy to play for casuals I'm sure it'll be much closer. Let's see how SFV does in the long term.
 
Also does Nintendo run officially sanctioned Smash Tourneys? I remember they were hesitant to smash even being streamed at evo at first, which kinda shows their priorities regardless of Smash competitive scene
This is what I was thinking. There's only so much people power out there. You can split hairs over sales, fans, moments however you like. If there's no corporate push for Smash to be out there as a competitive game it's going to remain in the back seat.

There's also something to be said about Street Fighter's longer history. Sort of like how Ferrari is considered to be a core part of Formula 1 now.
 
Because Smash sells a lot more than Street Fighter.

some numbers to go along with that:

22.65m (most of that are versions of SF II and various SF IV versions with one SF Alpha in there) (not factored in, all the SF titles that didn't reach 1m)
25.46m (just Smash Brawl, Wii U + 3DS)
38.42m (all Smash versions including 64 and Melee)

I think it's easy to see how SF's bread and butter is the competitive scene that keeps it alive mostly whereas Smash's party game status has made it reach a significantly larger audience consistently.
 
SF5 outselling Smash 4? I don't see that happening, even if SF5 has Super and Ultra editions down the line. That's not a slight against SF5, but Smash 4 combined is already near Brawl's huge LTD sales numbers, and will continue to sell for a few more years. That's just a huge baseline for SF5 to reach.
It is worth considering that the 3DS version of Smash 4 alone isn't that far behind what took SF4 multiple versions and numerous platforms to sell.

I thought Tekken 3 was
It's the second best after Brawl, which has about 5 million sales over T3.
 
It's not a fair way to compare.

- The sales that the Wii had are the most important reason that all the Nintendo games made ridiculous numbers.
- 3ds & Wii U Smash came with no competition to both markets (3ds also beeing THE device in Japan).
- SFIV came in when fighting games were almost dead (mainstream). Also in a ridiculous time with Batman, ACII, CoD:MW2, Resident Evil 5, Uncharted 2, Bonderlands, Left 4 Dead 2, Dragon Age Origin.
- Don't think I have to say what happened with SFIII and the time it was.
- SF still sold 7M (according to Capcom) besides the fact that was bigger in the arcades

The problem with SF it's that it's not a party game like smash. I'm sure everybody has a friend that likes the game but doesn't buy it cuz "I suck at FG". Not saying it could surpass Smash in sales, but if it was as easy to play for casuals I'm sure it'll be much closer. Let's see how SFV does in the long term.
Melee sold over 7 million units on the fucking Gamecube.
 
SFv will not even come close to smash sales number. It will not even sell 20% of what MK and smash sold. The verdict is out by people. This game will fail badly financially.

I really don't think the general public gives a fuck about lack of single player content. Street Fighter is a huge title.

SF has a huge amount of competitive players relative to its install base

Smash has a relatively small amount of competitive players compared to its massive install base.

Simple

This just isn't true. The amount of competitive players for both games relative to its install base is comparable. Smash tournament streams get more viewers than Street Fighter tournament streams, and Smash games consistently have more entrants in tournaments around the calendar than Street Fighter does. The only time Street Fighter has more entrants than Smash is Evo, which is once a year. Comparing the #2 SF tournament of the year to the #2 Melee or Smash 4 tournament of the year is laughable. Smash numbers shit all over Street Fighter.

I don't think so. It might outsell the Wii U version of Smash 4 (which is sitting at 4.61 million right now) eventually.

Yeah I was talking about Smash for Wii U specifically. I think Street Fighter V will outsell it eventually. Including Smash for 3DS sales? Probably not :P
 
It's not a fair way to compare.

- The sales that the Wii had are the most important reason that all the Nintendo games made ridiculous numbers.
- 3ds & Wii U Smash came with no competition to both markets (3ds also beeing THE device in Japan).
- SFIV came in when fighting games were almost dead (mainstream). Also in a ridiculous time with Batman, ACII, CoD:MW2, Resident Evil 5, Uncharted 2, Bonderlands, Left 4 Dead 2, Dragon Age Origin.
- Don't think I have to say what happened with SFIII and the time it was.
- SF still sold 7M (according to Capcom) besides the fact that was bigger in the arcades


The problem with SF it's that it's not a party game like smash. I'm sure everybody has a friend that likes the game but doesn't buy it cuz "I suck at FG". Not saying it could surpass Smash in sales, but if it was as easy to play for casuals I'm sure it'll be much closer. Let's see how SFV does in the long term.
I'm simply talking about proportions. One game sells way more, so the proportion of competitive players to the overall userbase will be smaller, it's just natural.

1 million players out of 2 million sales is half of the userbase. One million players out of 12 million sales is a minority.
 
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