I try not to let my general pessimism for the direction fighting game communities are trending show too much. I’m pretty fortunate to have a local community that plays lots of games, has a regular meetup spot that isn’t going anywhere, and has a lot of very good players to boot. The reality is, however, that this is a pretty privileged position in 2023 – if I wasn’t in a major metropolitan area, one of the biggest in the US, I think my situation would be far more dire.
It is with this knowledge of how lucky I am that I can’t help but view a certain type of take with a bit of contempt, one that was echoed in some videos I watched recently.
While these videos were released a month apart, they both have the same general theme: ‘Esports’, here meaning the ecosystem encompassing all competitive games that aren’t fighters, is on its deathbed, while fighting games and their communities are on the come up and poised to succeed where ‘Esports’ failed. Evidence cited includes the fact that the recent Evolution tournament, with its staggering 7,000 + player bracket for SF6, was the largest single bracket in fighting game history, Street Fighter 6 was released to critical and commercial success, and that the battle for superior netcode has resulted in every major release having a fully functioning online multiplayer core, a hard-fought victory.
Esports, they say, has finally been hoisted by its own petard. Years of venture capital cash, unearned and unwisely spent, have been cut off, leaving teams scrambling to find ways to monetize and entire leagues threatening to unwind. Not only that, the all-online nature of most major Esports titles and its confusing path-to-pro opportunities has left it bereft of a culture that can sustain long-term interest. The money was there, but the heart wasn’t, and when they couldn’t afford to pay people, that was the end of the line. The superior method, the open bracket tournament favored by FGC titles, has won the day.
That’s all well and good, but this narrative only makes sense if you’re, pardon my French, fucking blind.
Eric “Big E” Small has been hosting large-scale tournaments in the northeast for over twenty years, but as seen above, he will be taking ‘a break’ after 2023. The reasoning hasn’t been said, but Small suffered a stroke this year, which probably isn’t helping. With the loss of the series of tournaments he runs yearlong (Winter Brawl, Summer Jam, The Fall Classic, NEC), a historical FGC event will be gone, but not only that, a gaping hole will be left in that area for large regional events, with the exception of Defend the North, and the larger East Coast Throwdown event.
This story, however, is not unique, and is in fact part of a pattern that had been happening even before the pandemic. Every major California event, whether it was long-running events like SoCal Regionals or NorCal Regionals, or start-up events like Major League Gaming events, West Coast Warzone or the weekly Wednesday Night Fights from Super Arcade, are all gone. Northwest Majors, running out of Washington State, is also gone. With them, the entire western coast and swaths of the southwest no longer have regional offline competition, and Evo is the closest major offline event, which is really more of a boutique convention, a super major.
If you’re in the south, this is also true. Kumite in Tennessee and Texas, Final Round, and The Fall Classic have all vanished, too. Much like the west, the only event that is above local in the south to go to is CEO, another super event. There’s an argument to be made that the midwest is probably the region still most blessed with offline events, from super major Combo Breaker to solid regionals like Frosty Faustings and the Youmacon convention. But even for those, one can’t help but wonder how much longer they will last, given the ongoing trends.
I’ve been competing in fighting games ever since the last major boom period of the late aughts, and it’s weird to see that most of the events and locals that really got big in that era are mostly gone. The rising tide did not, in fact, lift all ships, only some. No slight to those events either – the people that run those events work very very hard and bleed a lot of money to make those events the successes that they are. They became the surviving events not solely based on location or attendance numbers alone, but because the experience made it a can’t miss event. An experience, sadly, that would dominate the market and force everyone around them to aspire to.
One of the talking points in those videos for why Esports is on the outs is because they grew ‘too fast,’ and now don’t have a way to operate functionally without massive influxes of cash. Somehow, I guess, this doesn’t apply to FGC events, which are probably worse off in that regard. Evo is at least owned by one of the biggest corporations on earth, but every other event still has the same problem – you have to accept insane work schedules for non-existent compensation and that’s that, all while consumer expectations cause event costs to skyrocket. These aren’t run by publishers with massive pockets, it’s by people like you and me who take time off from their real jobs to invest a ton of money and time into a proven money-loser. And when the market demands a level of growth that is unavailable to all but 2 or 3 events, you see this kind of brutal market correction, much the same as what happened with more general Esports endeavors.
Running an event the size of a super major is a herculean task, not the least of which is the cost of doing business. Alex Jebailey, CEO lead TO, posted a snippet of what a discounted rate for a hotel internet package in the tournament’s former home of Orlando would be – $65,000. Many would argue that it’s a racket, that these providers can bleed the customer dry because they are the only game in town, but that’s reality. That is before you add in licensing fees, rental fees, equipment fees, payment for production staff, payment for tournament staff, rooms for that staff, etc. It’s pretty well known that almost no major tournament runs anywhere close to profit, but I am not sure people appreciate just how much they don’t.
Some might argue that the problem is everyone wanting to keep up with the Joneses – organizers with regional aspirations should strive to host smaller events with fewer games and with an expectation for a more competitor-friendly and less viewer-friendly schedule and broadcast. Perhaps that is a fair point, but I also remember being someone who played a much less competitively popular game in 2012-2013. Mortal Kombat (2011) was most popular in the northeast, and those tournaments were always big events in the community featuring all sorts of high level play. But the broadcasting could tend to be a little suspect, with the streaming team more or less on their own to get the proper internet signal to stream and run the brackets at the same time. In hindsight, this is understandable – but that’s 30+ year old me talking. As someone who was deep into this? We were brutal if there was downtime or the stream quality wasn’t great, and that was 10 years ago! There’s no argument that a sort of downscaling is necessary, but will the fanbase/playerbase (they are one in the same) accept it in a reasonable manner? Based on my experiences, I have my doubts. Years of conditioning, no matter how unsustainable, are hard to undo overnight.
The obvious counter to this would be that because fighting games now have the superior, near-flawless rollback netcode, things can be simpler now. There are, in fact, online tourneys almost every week, and they can get pretty large, too. Most of them are not region-locked except for outside the US, too, so there’s no shortage of tournaments featuring extremely talented players from across the country. Not only that, but because there’s little rebroadcasting privileges to worry about, popular FGC influencers can stream their tournament runs and bring attention to whatever group or organization is running that online tournament. It is still very hard work, taking hours and labor from people who likely aren’t even recouping the much smaller costs, but it’s inarguably a more viable method for someone wanting to organize than going out and renting a space to do the same thing.
And yet, in a cruel twist of fate, it is this new normal that will, in my opinion, be the true beginning of the end.
The videos I watched made the point that Esports proper suffers from a sort of distinct uncoolness, an albatross around its neck that it can never shake. The point made is that there is a distinct lack of identity from Esports, because it got so much money that was on a corporate leash and demanded a certain blasé aesthetic. People routinely mock the “Esports pose” of a pale gamer trying to look tough in a jersey crossing their arms, higher-tier Esports broadcasts demand business casual looks for their broadcasting teams, and much is made of the fact that some of its most talented players are not particularly charismatic. Moreover, the fact that the vast majority of mid to high-level play takes place online, where it’s hard to put names to faces and there’s no crowd reactions that enhance the excitement, means the wider community rarely gets to stand out amongst broadcasts full of corporate sponsors and muted broadcasters.
I actually somewhat agree with this point! To me, what makes a fighting game event stand out is that the spectators are not simply consumers waiting for the next match to consume, but indeed part of the show. There’s not one individual or token catchphrase or lingo that can represent a broad ecosystem. Quick handshakes and frantic shouts for side-bets were a frequent occurrence if you were watching an important match. Allies of each opposing side would either be barely off or on-stage, whooping wildly when they scored a victory. A crowd fervently hoping that the American player will triumph over a great player from another nation. A half-whistled compliment about a game you don’t know may turn into a 20-minute long conversation. It’s not uncommon to wander the halls of the hotel and find someone settling the score in some game played on a laptop hosting its own small crowd. Somewhere on the 12th floor, there is a suite full of people who are a combination of high, drunk, and broke, getting sweaty and heated talking about matchups and tier lists. All around are people holding big arcade controllers, keyboards, guitar hero controllers, or Frankenstein-horrors beyond your comprehension. Someone’s running a supergun attached to a monitor not made anytime this millennium running a Japanese-only arcade fighting game you’ve never seen before. Some annoying fuck is walking up and down the convention floor with a megaphone, shilling a tournament for the game Windjammers. It is us.
When reduced to the online tournament format, this is all lost. The side betting, the local group cheering on their player, the eclectic mix of players – all now quarantined to emotes in a stream chat that flies by so quickly and is full of such bile it’s not even worth looking at. Zoom’d in commentators pretend to banter amidst packet loss and poor quality microphones. The same players play and place in every tournament, eschewing any sort of regional boundaries. No one is screaming about Windjammers.
In this new era, these online tournaments serve as content aggregators, dealing out a new product to be consumed every week. ‘The FGC’ itself becomes very small, with a rotating cast of broadcasters and players/influencers being the only recognizable figures amongst a sea of names on a Start.GG bracket. As developers step in to put more online events into their tournament circuits, control is slowly ceded over to them. The ‘community’ becomes the most meme-able, viral moments on the app formerly known as Twitter, which can gin up views for a couple of weeks. Ad reads, a necessary evil, become our new cultural signifiers – Chipotle is now the culture.
I don’t want to be Chipotle.
Indeed, I see a future that is populated by content farms like the channel hosting one of the videos from earlier, Dashfight. Dashfight is a content vertical for WePlay Holding, a Ukraine-based Esports company that has been involved in major production for years. FGC heads may remember them from their attempts to run a fighting game league that was shut down by publishers Bandai-Namco and Netherrealm Studios, allegedly due to their choice of sponsorship being a gambling site of dubious origin. Dashfight serves to be a hub for all fighting game-related content, with a website that collects news and results and a YouTube page which serves up ‘original’ content. This stuff is the kind of slob work that a Buzzfeed editor might cum in their pants over, videos of popular games with text over them that was copied from Wikipedia. The only content that catches on is made largely by other, more famous creators, such as tutorials of wildly varying quality for fighting game characters. It’s the definition of Esports, a lot of money going into making something look expensive while also trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and gaining none. It won’t exist in another year or two, but there will be many more like it, and it makes me sad.
Ultimately, I believe the pitfalls of Esports and the FGC are intertwined, and where one fails so do both. To assert that the FGC is taking a victory lap instead of whistling past the graveyard is ignorant at best, and would require the only metric of success being how well the games sell or how well Evo is doing. Yes, Evo did very well; yes, SF6 sold well and Tekken 8 and Mortal Kombat 1 will as well; no, that doesn’t mean everything is gravy.
I would encourage those who believe that to look around and understand just how much has been lost up to this moment. The pandemic was a much harder squeeze than it might have appeared, and I’m very hesitant to say that there has been a full recovery since then, as the losses even prior to that were substantial. These things have been a labor of love for a long time, but that love can, and has, been tested by the fact that it simply can’t make money in its current state. The instant that an organizer decides that love is not enough to overcome that, it’s done, and that has been happening over and over again.
Local scenes across the country still abound, and not everything is condensed to online-only. Nor do I even think the format is the worst thing in the world – I just believe it was never meant to be the only game in town. When people speak of ‘The Dark Ages’ in the mid-00’s, I don’t think they’re referring to their being a lack of games or even that there were no events to go to – the real issue was the painful transition of finding new places to play after the traditional arcades went up in smoke, while fighting games languished without any sort of viable LAN-based alternative. I believe a similar event is taking place now, with online play (good online play, thank God) usurping offline tournaments as the preferred method of many.
I am old, and old ways die hard. While it’s antiquated, I can’t help but think about what is lost in that transition to the future, convenient and more stable though it may be. I worry about the centralizing of all that influence, how the push for individual success over collective success is much stronger, and what Faustian bargains will be made to publishers as they continue to plug their tentacles in. Do I worry too much? Who’s to say. What I do know is I don’t run on vibes – shiny new toys and a few really well-attended tournaments can’t gloss over what I believe to be significant underlying issues, issues of labor, of compensation, of a loss of what makes us us.
But MK1 still looks pretty sick, eh? Day 1.
Them's fighting words!! 
Leave a comment