Alright then, in the previous part we covered the presentation and now we move onto the content, marketing and community response. Edit: added a little note about predictions and Samsho marketing

SNK has opened a survey and I hope you all send your opinions and feelings on these important points for the future of the games that we want to play:

• Easy / Modern / Smart modes
• 1P content such as action RPG areas and minigames
• Visual Novel content
• Daily Quests
• Ranked Mode

Ok now back to the rant, I mean, review.

Game Content

Fatal Fury COTW has a solid arcade mode experience, with plenty of voice acting, long endings and hidden bosses to find.  Is this enough for the casual player?  Maybe.  Is it competitve with the concurrent fighting game titles?  Not really.

In the cut scenes, SNK used the comic book style quite nicely, with panels displaying frozen in time 3d models, as the camera pans around them during dialogue.  It’s a nice artistic style, but it will not impress players who have been watching Tekken cinematics.  However, SF6 does pretty much the same thing in its endings so in the end, this SNK production is satisfactory.

There are conditions to reach bosses however, which don’t seem apparent and leads some people to thinking that the game is lacking. Again, in true arcade style, hidden bosses are not revealed to the player, until they see the end credits, and then the penny should drop, unless they skipped everything.  Now some conditions seem strange, to get to the boss for some characters, you need to play on hardest and not lose a match. Again, SNK is either stuck in the past or refusing to adapt for the demands of these more casual players.

SNK could have established daily quests and engaged their playerbase, but there’s not much to unlock in the game apart from the bosses, a special move and some patterns for edit mode. And no, they won’t explain that anywhere, these are traditional secrets that you can only find in guides. Some of the cutscene artwork varies in quality but there are some nice scenes and lore to keep readers busy.  Ironically I don’t have time for it, nor do I feel FOMO, as there is no required login or visible reward to grind for.  I think that’s a loss for SNK.

Speaking of bosses, SF6 didn’t even have a boss, did people cry about it? No, they defended the decision, lol, as they didn’t want to deal with a ‘’cheap overpowered NPC’’… if this is how the majority feel (which I doubt), SNK is faced again with pandering to the threat of a non-purchase.  SNK is famous for its bosses, so they will have to decide, but I don’t think they should change this. Getting good to meet the boss is a traditional grind, a very strange reward, but a satisfactory and thrilling ride.

Speaking of opinions, let’s review the last few weeks.

Community Response

Nobody really talked about the game being bad, or boring.  Pretty much everyone said it’s fun!!!  You can see this on many streams and social channels.  I did pick on some complaints about Smart Style, echoing what I’ve written.  The real discussion point was not even about the game, it was the inclusion of the real life guests, and then pointing the finger at them for the sales performance.

Now, after three weeks, this has fizzled out.  Well, everything has.  The three week launch period is over.  The huge live events are done.  The talk that is left is from the community, arguing about game balance.  New vtubers trying it out and mashing buttons to no avail but making nice squeaky voices that entertain.  Since he appeared at EVO Japan, the opinion of Salvatore has turned positive.  The trolls trying to poke fun at the estimated player count can’t argue with matchmaking that actually works.  I reached rank B2 around 9000th place,  so what does that actually mean about the online environment?  It’s still not millions of players, but there is certainly healthy online activity.  Combo Breaker just ended with 900 entrants for COTW, compared to SF6’s 1323, Tekken 8’s 1106 and Mortal Kombat’s 180.  Pretty damn good for a 20 year old name.   However, getting that name to actually sell was quite a challenge for marketing, arguably a target set way too high.

Marketing

And marketing department will have some explaining to do, if you can imagine the budget spent.  Where are the million players?  Where are all the Ronaldo fans?  Famitsu reported physical sales of 6k in Japan, which doesn’t include digital, but it simply isn’t as much as KOF at 9k, and Samsho sold 40k (physically sold out).  Again, this doesn’t represent global sales, and the game did appear in Steam charts for a week.  It also appeared in Playstation best sellers as a gold title, but without concrete numbers, the critics and trolls can continue to dismiss the game’s success, while supporters can’t do anything but point out the matchmaking, attendance at events and increasing number of streams and videos.  SNK won’t announce anything until it breaks a record or something.  All the streamers who said they would boycott, have been streaming the game, and there’s more and more videos on youtube.  But here lies the issue, it seems to me that COTW is becoming popular spectator content.  That’s kind of good, but not exactly going to drive sales.  Or will it?

It’s easy to look back in retrospect and say, well of course that wouldn’t work, while at the same time, in terms of Marketing, if you present the product, that’s half the battle won.  Could we predict anything else?  Did anyone predict Samurai Shodown would sell out?  Doubt it.    The same kind of easy and conclusions can be made after the fact, not before.  Even if we study the marketing of Samsho, there are so many factors to consider that can affect sales performance.

The audience saw the product, as for example at Wrestlemania, and they saw the product many times.  However, we don’t have any evidence to prove they were persuaded to buy AND PLAY the game.  To be honest, I was quite surprised that Ronaldo’s fans didn’t pick up the game to play as their hero.   I thought those videos (what’s your favourite move? Ah yes the special move! nnnnnng) would be enough to shift a good volume, but we can’t really know, even as Playstation advertises their monthly picks with his COTW portrait on the cover, until SNK publishes a celebratory announcement.  They have not.  Perhaps sales will pick up, but it certainly wasn’t the amazing launch that I’m guessing a certain higher up was confident in.

I had a huge wall of text to post but I’m going to summarise this swifly, the marketing failed in that it tried to push a game that isn’t as popular as KOF and Samsho, and notably how it simply didn’t guide the celebrities to play the game with Smart Style.  I didn’t see any real love for the game in the many many featured clips (I’ll not mention certain segments that any streamer could have done better).  As discussed with my students, they know when their favourite influencer is getting paid and will ignore the product in question.  I was delusional to think sales would be automatic, but I wanted my favourite game company to succeed, if nobody shills, people just go with the status quo, f that lol, play KOF, Shermie is the best!  Oh wait, this is about COTW.  Well, even with lower than expected sales, the one thing that definitely remains is the name Chipotle, I mean, Fatal Fury, in people’s heads.

I’m not sure people have linked the names in flashing nights to a fighting game, and getting them to play it is another question, but that COTW and the name SNK are back in front of a crowd who hasn’t seen them for decades, not to mention a new younger crowd who has no idea who they are.  They will, if this continues, and that’s a big question for SNK’s backers, because I don’t think they are going to get a return anywhere near on what they invested, in the short term.  However, if this is part of the long term strategy for SNK to become a top 10 developer, it’s certainly a start, but looking at the actual content in the game, SNK evidently needs more actual developers to deliver competitively and marketing needs more time and people who actually understand the product to ensure the execution is meaningful and effective, get these frauds out of the way and get this ball rolling properly.

SNK continues to roll out music collabs, they may have a long term plan for the next three years, and sales can keep going, as we saw with SF6.  COTW made a huge impact at Combo Breaker and Brussels Challenge, proving that there is no boycott, much like the Ubisoft AC debacle, but even if talk is cheap, the (estimated) numbers don’t lie (within a margin of error); after the launch, they  need to go back to their community and please them to keep buying DLC to keep the project afloat, and remember, KOF fans, we need this game to do well, otherwise KOF16 is in danger.  Let’s look forward to EWC (May 30th) and SNKWC, with all the major fighting game personalities getting into it (definitely not just for that $2.5million pot), COTW is certainly is worth watching!

Final words

COTW is an extremely hardcore fighting game with demanding inputs and strategy, it cannot be played like the others, and punishes the mashing of buttons, which on the other hand makes the game less accessible to the casual player.  It’s certainly fun, but I wish for a system where I can mash and have fun.  It should have quasi-forced me to play more but as it doesn’t, I spend more time on gacha games, which do.  Still, the matchmaking is perfect, so I’ll beat people up on stream (53% winrate kek) till KOF16 comes out.

Once again, please fill in the survey and tell SNK what you think, I’m sure they want to datamine it to find the CR7 fans but imo we need to push them to do better in all aspects.  Do not settle and let them be complacent.