Individually, a person who plays fighting games may have a bunch of different complicated nuanced motivations and emotions that are served by different parts of the fighting game experience — not limited to the game itself on their console, but the broader journey of mastery and connectivity. The high-minded ideal FGC stuff I mentioned above is real and does exist! It just doesn’t exist enough to sell the millions of copies that go into funding the next Street Fighter or Tekken. At scale, building and selling games as a service looks a lot more like making a theme park or a casino, where you have customers entering at a given point, you give them choices on what kind of experience they can have in your game, and you give them clear signs and paths to choose from in order to make it easy for them. In the above section, we established that people play video games because they want to feel something specific. It’s a brief moment of agency in a day where you were otherwise probably at the mercy of some stupid bullshit at your job, or at school, or in your family, or on the bus, or whatever. We spend most of our day pushing the boulder up, and the brief moment of rest we get is choosing the video game we play in between eating dinner and going to sleep, where we get to act like the person we imagine ourselves to be as the boulder rolls back down the hill.
"Why ranked sucks and we can't get rid of it"
Wrote about how fighting games rely on ranked matchmaking to retain players even though it often makes the experience worse. Read this to learn about friction, addiction, motivation, and how you can Ranked responsibly.
www.patreon.com/posts/152427...
