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The “Casualization” of Modern Fighting Games and

its effect on the FGC

Joshua L. Scott

ENG1102

March 3, 2024

Gaming has become an increasingly prevalent part of the daily lives of many people in the

modern age, and is now one of, if not the biggest media industry on the planet. Since the days of the

Nintendo Wii, gaming has exploded, expanding from a previously niche activity, with a dedicated

hardcore scene at its heart, to one that even the most technologically illiterate can and do actively

participate in. This can be chalked up to an increase in the accessibility of video games, with many

nowadays providing simpler, more intuitive control schemes than previous titles, for instance Wii

sports is controlled through a motion sensing controller that allows the player to play sports in a virtual

world using real-world motions one would do in that sport, such as swinging the remote to swing a

virtual golf club, which is in stark contrast to older sports titles which would require the player to

partake in sports through using a traditional controller, which would involve the player using a (to the

uninitiated) complex set of control methods and buttons in order to achieve the same result as swinging

a Wiimote. This sort of “Casual Revolution” started roughly in the 2000s with the introduction of the

Wii and the Nintendo DS, which were both heavily marketed at a more casual audience, as well as the

rise of smartphones and the in tandem rise of smartphone games, which were generally very simple and

easy to pick up and continue playing, such as Angry Birds and Cut-The-Rope. The casual revolution

touched a myriad of genres during this time, sports games, puzzle games, platformers, but one genre

that was relatively untouched during this era was the Fighting Game. Fighting Game can generally be
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defined as a Player vs Player (usually with a Computer controlled player component added for single-

player use) video game where both players seek to decrease the other player’s health to zero, utilizing a

wide variety of attack types, most of which are martial arts moves. In the 2000s fighting games were

hitting a rough patch for the most part, with companies deemphasizing their fighting game output as a

result of a general lack of player interest (in comparison to the fighting game boom of the 1990s). This

was an era plagued by numerous canceled releases, critical failures, and a shrinking, and increasingly

niche, fighting game community forming. These hard times would come to an end with the release of

Street Fighter 4, a title that saw critical success and kickstarted the fighting game industry again, with a

sort of renaissance happening as of now with the release of major titles being back to back. The

companies producing these fighting games, however, seem to have been influenced by the hard 2000s,

and have, as a whole, catered more towards a casual crowd with their newer releases. A large casual

appeal of course means more sales, as none of these companies want a “good but poorly selling game”,

which has been a staple marker of many fighting game releases of the past. They were especially

indicative of Capcom, the forerunner of fighting games since their inception with Street Fighter 1.

These sorts of releases included games even outside the fighting game realm, like Asura’s Wrath and

Okami, which are “Classics” according to the hardcore gaming community, but sold poorly. Capcom,

and the companies that follow in its footsteps, have pushed for more casual appealing games, through

simpler controls (a major point of contention for the existing FGC), viral/trendy marketing, and live

service style monetization. The actions of companies have been contentious among gamers, with a

strong dichotomy of people who are for these newer methods, and those who are strongly against them.

These debates fall into the realm of the larger conflict that has slowly raged within the gaming

community for years, casuals vs hardcores. The actual study into this dichotomy has been scarce, with a

few scant pieces covering the topic of casual gaming and its effects on and the opinions of the core

gaming fandom, one of the most solid studies being sourced for this research piece. A large gap of
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research exists regarding this topic and the wider conversation, but there have been a wide variety of

studies into related topics, like accessibility, difficulty, marketing, and monetization, which can be

pieced together to fill the niche of this topic, which has thus far remained untouched by the academic

world. Given this topic, I pose a question. Is this strategy, I will henceforth dub “casualization”, a

positive or negative phenomenon for the games themselves and the players that play/are fans of them?

The focus of the players lies squarely on the existing population of mid-core and hardcore players,

those who would be returning from older titles and would have a noticeable effect put upon them as

opposed to new casuals, who would have been joining an environment already changed, lacking a

frame of reference. Existing research suggests in broad terms that the “casualization” of the fighting

game genre is a generally positive change for the industry and the video games themselves, however,

my primary research paints a much different story, where the effects of this change to fighting games

has led to sweeping negative outcomes for the community. Simply put, this shift presents a tough spot

for both the fighting game community and developers, games are given longer lifespans and the

community can naturally grow from new fans being hooked on the genre, but at the same time these

game’s strategies of monetization can seem tone deaf to most and, importantly, these new players using

the new command systems are almost universally despised by the community. The conversation

therefore isn’t so cut and dry as some might believe on either side, and herein I will discuss the

conversation and come to a more nuanced stance on the subject, synthesizing both Primary and

Secondary sources. This research paper will be structured with a literature review, covering the

academic sources provided within the annotated bibliography, and will then go into the methods and

results of my primary research, which focuses on user generated content on Twitter, showing player

opinion on various relevant topics, as well as player count and sales figures. There will then be a

discussion that will synthesize both into the central claim, that this “casualization” is a mixed bag for

the community, and then a conclusion.

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Literature Review
The literature review was conducted in two different parts over the course of the creation of this

research paper. Tunnel vision relating to the topic at hand had led to the literature review focusing

solely on a single aspect of the conversation at hand, that being casual/modern style controls. This

aspect is pivotal, of course, being the most prominent issue taken by the community towards newer

games and being one of the primary selling points for games like Street Fighter 6. The topic of casual

controls was difficult to find academic research on, this difficulty can be chalked up to various reasons,

though my immediate assumption would be that video game topics like this are just not on the radar of

any relevant researchers, who are tackling hot button issues that aren't necessarily of interest to people

who play games. For instance, searching for "video games” on Google Scholar and looking at only the

papers published this year, we see very little relating to topics like "controls" or really much pertaining

to the act of playing games themselves. On the first page alone (as of writing this), we are presented

with a majority of papers pertaining to the social sciences, with little in reference to gameplay. Given

what is shown, it seems researchers are more interested in the politics of video games, rather than the

games themselves. This point is actually touched on (in a way) in (Mattiassi, 2019):

However, the impact of these theories has been largely focused on modern mimetic interfaces,

such as virtual reality, but only slightly affect traditional interfaces even if they still comprise

the large majority of the human-computer interaction. Fighting games mostly use non-mimetic

interfaces, such as traditional gaming pads, so that the player needs to act with a very restricted

range of movements, limited to fingers, hand, wrists and arms muscles.

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This doesn’t pertain much to the point of (Mattiassi, 2019), or its inclusion, but does nicely

demonstrate a similar issue I faced with the casual controls thread within this topic, in that it really isn’t

something being focused on, with traditional control methods (using a controller) seemingly not being

of interest to researchers. Mattiassi’s paper heavily suggested that players find intuitive controls to be

more enjoyable and easier to learn, intuitive here meaning ones where button inputs were easily

understood in how they worked. Street Fighter was found to be the least intuitive of the command

systems studied, being a 6-button game traditionally and having the buttons be divided arbitrarily into

kicks and punches of different strength. This paper brilliantly shows that a modern control scheme with

simpler input methods seems to be a better track for the future of a game like Street Fighter. Tekken, in

contrast, was shown to have a very intuitive input system, with Tekken being a 4 button game

consisting of left and right kicks and punches. The other two topics that I had failed initially to address,

but in the second wave of research came around to were the viral marketing angle of “casualization”

and the monetization methods of Street Fighter 6 and Tekken. The source used for monetization was

(Petrovskaya, 2010), which focused on Dota 2’s battle pass system of monetization. This paper showed

that a battle pass, which is a feature where in new content is perpetually added to a video game and

only given to players when they complete certain in game tasks and or buy the content (all content by

the way being time sensitive for acquiring), allowed Dota 2 to thrive for years, with player counts being

kept high by large spikes during battle pass seasons. A season-based method of content delivery and

monetization is present within Street Fighter 6, which is in lieu of similar systems in basically every

other popular game right now, such as Fortnite. For viral marketing, I sourced (Malinen, 2018), a

literature review focused entirely on video game viral marketing. It provides good analogs to the stunts

taken by Capcom when hyping up Street Fighter 6, like the Lil Wayne collaboration, and provides

insight into how effective similar schemes were. (Juul, 2010) provided some insight into the almost

class warfare within gaming between casual and hardcore players, and how that affects the industry, but
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it basically stands alone in addressing a topic like that, and this document is pivotal, if not essential, as

the only published piece I could find that touched on this important topic within the conversation. The

primary conclusion gleaned from Casual Revolution can be that casual games are on the rise (though

this book was written in 2010, so it would be more accurate to say casual games have been on the rise),

and that the industry will pivot more into appeasing a casual crowd. There are distinct gaps in the body

of research regarding this topic, with there already being a minimal focus on the conversation as a

whole among academics. For starters, excluding (Juul, 2010), very little effort has been put into getting

player opinion on really anything. Even “Casual Revolution” (Juul, 2010) only surveyed an extremely

small and frankly unrepresentative group of casual gamers, with the sample being 93% female and

having a median age of 41 (the survey was also conducted in 2010 which was 14 years ago). There’s

also a gap regarding the new development of casual/modern controls, the study about the difficulty of

command systems in Street Fighter and Tekken was conducted during the Street Fighter 5 and Tekken 7

era, which was before the advent of these styles in the newest releases (which all came out in the last

year or so). In regard to command systems as well, there’s not much about the perceived and actual

fairness of modern vs traditional controls.

Methods
The methods taken to get this data were pretty straightforward, I went onto Twitter.com and

used the search feature to find posts relating to topics I wanted to have community feedback on. The

way I found these with the search involved using the keywords “Modern Controls”, “Modern Controls

Tekken”, “Special Style Tekken”, “Nijisanji Street Fighter”, “Lil Wayne Street Fighter”, “scrub

Tekken”. There is one article excerpt thrown in from Esports Illustrated that just touches on the

community being torn on Nijisanji (a vtuber organization) being included as skins in Street Fighter. The

metrics for player numbers were from Steamdb, a site dedicated to showing concurrent player counts,
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with the data being shown from the last month for both. Sales figures had to be sourced from various

websites as getting specific data all from one source is impossible, game sales aren’t usually aggregated

in a singular place unless it’s in a context much like this, where they’re being compared. The raw data

is useful in illustrating if the strategies taken by Capcom and Namco to make their games more casual

and accessible specifically are actually paying off in making the games have larger concurrent player

counts and sales. I would have preferred directly interviewing a wide range of people instead of using

Twitter since there are inherent flaws to using it but finding enough people in the FGC (to whom the

topic would be relevant, since a lot of fighting game players who are out in the open at UCF actually

only play Super Smash Brothers) in a short amount of time around UCF would have been too difficult.
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Results
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A collection of Tweets from the FGC, coded corresponding to emotional response and topic.
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Source: Capcom of Japan

Source: steamdb.info
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Source: Steamdb.info

Source: Bandai Namco Europe

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Source: Imdb (originally sourced from an Investor Relations report that is no longer online)
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Source: Katsuhiro Harada’s Twitter

Discussion

As a quick reminder, the subject of this research paper is the “Casualization” (a word invented

for this purpose, broadly meaning making something appeal to more casual types of players) of modern

fighting games (specifically Tekken and Street Fighter) and its effects on the FGC (the fighting game

community, specifically referring to the more hardcore and midcore ranks of the community who are
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more likely to have been fans for an extended period of time and have a skill level and knowledge level

unbefitting of being deemed casual). The stance taken in this research paper is that the effect isn’t

necessarily positive or negative all the way, existing in a gray area. Originally, I had taken the stance

that these changes were overwhelmingly positive, given the information that can be extrapolated and

my own analysis of that information I had come to the conclusion that a more casual environment

within fighting games would lead to longer lasting and more prosperous fighting games, however the

secondary sources only represent one singular side of the story. After having researched for primary

data, as well as considering my own bias that I had up until then ignored out of academic integrity, I

had changed to a more nuanced approach. Though I will note, it is difficult to surmise if I possess a

bias relating to the data presented, or if it’s an informed opinion from being within the community and

having experienced things that would give me insight into the conversation.

The positive part, the silver lining perhaps, is that more casual fighting games tend to not only

sell more but tend to last longer as a result of more accessible features and business models that are

indicative of the “live-service” sort of casual games. This is shown with the sales numbers of Tekken 7

vs Tekken 8, with 8 selling two million copies within its first month on the market, in comparison to 10

million copies sold of 7 over the course of around 5 years. Tekken 8 has already 1/10th of the sales of

its predecessor within just a month of being on the market, this can be chalked up to various

circumstances, as well as the inclusion of accessible options. The difference in sales is a lot more

extreme for Street Fighter 6 vs 5, with 5 being a commercial failure, selling 1.4 million copies in its

first year, and 6 being a resounding success selling 3 million only half a year. Street Fighter really is the

better example for this sort of casualization and how it affects sales and player counts, given Alan

Mattaisai’s paper on fighting game inputs demonstrates its control scheme to be one of the most

difficult out those tested.

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Player counts are another important factor to include when speaking about the health of a

multiplayer video game. A multiplayer game with low player counts is the sign a game has died, since,

well, no one is playing the game. The “live-service” model of monetization is staple of casual gaming,

having been popularized in the early to mid 2010s, based upon the principle that constant additions and

updates can pump life into a game by providing new experiences and content, causing players to replay

a game for said content. Such practices were inspired by games like Team Fortress and Minecraft,

which in the 2010s survived off constant updates. With constant updates comes the ability to charge for

new content as well, introducing the concept of the battle pass and seasons.Seasons are a core feature

of the business model of both Tekken and Street Fighter in the modern age, with SF6 already having

season updates being pushed out. Seasons in these games involve the release of new cosmetic items,

which draw players back into the game. This business practice relies half and half on the cosmetic

items being appealing and the fear of missing out. On the SteamDB player count graph, we see Street

Fighter 6 edging about 20k concurrent players daily, which is pretty decent, but on Febuary 27th, which

was the release of the latest DLC character Ed, player counts spike up to 40k, and slowly decrease back

to the stable count of 20k over the course of the last 2 weeks. We also see a noticeable spike in player

counts with the release of Eddy Gordon in Tekken 8 (as shown on the Tekken 8 Steamdb graph). This

admittedly generic, live service sort of model with frequent updates and new characters being added

allows for these games to longer shelf lives than otherwise, as players will want to try out new

characters and features, returning to the game long after its initial release. These are primarily at the

benefit of the corporations creating the fighting games however, longer lasting games are always better

for the developer but are only better if the players themselves actually enjoy the game, which

transitions into the next section.

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On the community side, we see a mixed bag of responses to the actions and philosophies of

Capcom and Namco, but generally the sentiment is negative. Of the tweets gathered, there were quite

literally zero comments made by anyone in the community (who wasn’t Tekken creator Katsuhiro

Harada) that was openly and clearly pro-new players and pro-casual controls. The overwhelming

sentiment was that scrubs (new, bad players) were a plague upon these games and their preferred

method of playing was busted, with several instances of people posting clips of casuals getting stomped

in matches, jokes about the inputs being cheap (specifically the tweet with Segata Sanshiro mashing

buttons on a comically large Sega Saturn controller), and recently a large amount of tweets

commenting on how Akuma (the newest character to be added to Street Fighter 6) will be extremely

unfair with the simplistic method of inputting commands with modern controls. There was a single

tweet that was vaguely positive towards new players, advocating for a way for only casuals to queue up

with other casuals, eliminating the barrier of entry present given how “daunting” high level play is. The

viral marketing used by Capcom with Street Fighter, in contrast, is rather well received, with very

positive feedback on the Lil Wayne collab and the Nijisanji skins as shown in the twitter screenshots. It

should be noted however that this support for the marketing absolutely does not equate to sales

(Malinen, 2018):

One of these examples is Pokémon GO which became a major hit in 2016. And it has

reached

its success in many ways because of the viral marketing approaches. (Peckham

2016.) The viral videos, which were shown to the respondents as a part of the

primary research, have a success on the YouTube (five and 168 million views).

In addition to this, the respondents found those videos funny or at least

interesting. The question "Did these videos inspired you to join the game?" has
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gotten mostly negative answers for both videos, despite of the videos’ virality and

positive responses about the content. This result allowed the author to make the

conclusion that viral marketing alone is not that powerful tool, especially in a way

of the turning receivers of the information into active players. From the other

hand, it is the effective tool for increasing the awareness of a brand and the tool

which boosts the discussion about the product.

These people can be considered like empty calories for the community, joining the discourse

community but not actually participating in the main activity, or perhaps not even interacting with the

community at all and passing on from the viral marketing after not very long. These sort of community

members are generally considered as being part of the group known as “tourists”, a group which is

maligned by the more elitist parts of the community, which shown by the primary data on Twitter, make

up a majority, if only slight.

To reiterate, the casualization of fighting games can be seen as both negative and positive,

though more so negative for the community. Drives to make fighting games more accessible has led to

increased contempt for newer players among the elitist hardcore center of the FGC, artificial hype for

new games, and a perceived level of unfairness added to games. There is a silver-lining in the aspect

that Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6 will probably last for several years to come and have a steady player

count the entire time, for better or for worse.

Conclusion

I would like to address some limitations of this research paper. For the secondary sources it

really was hard to find relevant information for this conversation, given how new it is and the less

academic nature of the topic. Many changes would be made if the primary research was conducted
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differently. First of all, Twitter is terrible, and I’d would have rather taken data from a variety of places

and perhaps interview people in real life, instead of taking opinions from Twitter. It would have been

helpful to include in the field research in game in order to determine if modern controls really are

unfair or if the impact on the games and community are more than just complaining from a potentially

vocal minority. With more data on the reasons for the push towards casual, the real world (in game)

effects, and more proper player feedback, a more complete piece of research could be constructed, it

would also heavily benefit from academic research as well focusing on this conversation. Concluding

my own paper and claim, in the long term these changes will most likely be adapted to, with people

accepting the good with the bad, as they have with many other drastic shifts within fighting games. It’s

clear this business strategy is paying off for Namco and Capcom, so even if the community doesn’t

want to accept modern controls and live service aspects, they will really have no other choice. The

community and industry have been through rougher patches, and unlike the dark age of the 2000s or

competitive speedbumps like Tekken Tag 2 or SF5, there is a light at the end of the tunnel clearly

visible.

Work Cited

Kobari, Sachie. (2023). How Tekken 8 harnesses the power of PS5 – out January 26, 2024. Playstation

blog. https://blog.playstation.com/2023/08/29/how-tekken-8-harnesses-t

he-power-of-ps5-out-january-26-2024/

Taro (2023). The number of players is several times that of the previous game! We ask the developers

of "Street Fighter 6", which revolutionized fighting games, what is the driving force behind "new

acquisitions" [Interview]. Inside Games.

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https://www.inside-games.jp/article/2023/07/21/147316.html

Mattiassi, Alan. (2019). Fighting the game. Command systems and player-avatar interaction in fighting

games in a social cognitive neuroscience framework . Springer link.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-019-7231-2#Sec4

Petrovskaya, Elena. The Battle Pass: a Mixed-Methods Investigation into a Growing Type of Video

Game Monetisation. (2010). University of York.

Juul, Jesper. A Casual Revolution : Reinventing Video Games and Their Players (2010).The MIT press

https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=34b7698f-b77b-

4698-b511-505f194e1a29%40redis&bdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPWNvb2tpZSxzaGl

iJmF1dGh0eXBlPXNoaWImc2l0ZT1laG9zdC1saXZlJnNjb3BlPXNpd

GU%3d#AN=291830&db=nlebk

Malinen, Daniil. Viral Marketing as means of promoting video games (2018). Karelia University of

Applied Sciences. https://www.theseus.fi/handle/10024/159056