I don’t think Avatar showed any signs of flopping. This genre also only gets a few releases per year. It’s not that crowded.

I think what we’ve seen out of the fighting game space is the outstanding successes are chock full of things to do outside of the core competitive multiplayer (Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and even Dragon Ball FighterZ). Even if we do see a Killer Instinct that makes it to market, I don’t think Iron Galaxy will have been given the budget to incorporate those sorts of other modes.

I’d love for this to be wrong, but it’s hard to believe that Killer Instinct of all things would survive the Microsoft bloodbath.

A game like DBFZ can reach more than 10 million players even with a price barrier, so I can see the rationale for free to play. Personally, I think free to play is a horrible gamble for just about any game these days, regardless of genre, but only 10 characters and an enormous grind to unlock more, I would agree, was a death sentence for this game. Even if they launched with 20 characters, they were never going to get new ones out in this genre with a cadence that resembled League of Legends. And yeah, while the mechanics borrow heavily from some of my least favorite fighting games, they also told me to straight up not bother with it by way of anti-cheat.

I get where the cynicism comes from, but they still made their regular 30 hour campaign for RDR2 after GTA Online already blew up. They make campaigns like this. It’s what they do, it’s what these trailers and store pages allude to, and it’s what leaked footage shows. As much money as the online mode makes, they’re not about to shun the players they’ve had for decades as though they don’t matter, because those players are still worth billions of dollars to them, and work that goes into their usual campaigns can be repurposed for online after the fact.

Not when they keep showing the Bonnie and Clyde characters that we know are the playable protagonists. It takes more effort to believe that they’re not making a campaign like they’ve always made.

I’ve seen too many fighting games sell 10 million copies now to agree that fighting games are a small market.

They could have been phenomenally successful if they released a game with rollback back when there were almost none. Then 2021 came along and rollback fighters are basically all that exist anymore.

Horizon with co-op would be excellent. As a mode inside ordinary Horizon. No one asked for whatever this is.

There’s an offline mode, but it still needs to be authenticated through the Riot launcher, and depending on how it works, it could be a concern for preservation.

I think the smart money is on them continuing to do what they’ve been doing for decades, which is the kind of campaign they’ve made for decades, especially since there’s no online mode out of the gate.

This expectation is crazy to me. Most of what we’ve seen in an official capacity is cut scenes for a story mode resembling what they’ve been putting out since 2008, and that’s if you ignore the fact that gameplay has leaked multiple times and there won’t even be multiplayer at launch. Smart money is that there’s a campaign like they’ve always made and then the online rolls out months later, like their last two games.

Someone is probably far more likely to pick up a game like that that they just didn’t know was out rather than one they’ve never heard of before. If they could pull that trick on any game, they probably wouldn’t let a day go by without a banner, like today.

The reality is they want you to find those other games to maximize profit, which is where all of their work into recommendation engines and personalized release calendars has gone. But it’s not going to convince millions of people who want to play NBA 2K that they should buy the latest indie game instead.

I never felt like I formed a community on servers out of a server browser. I did get that years later on Discord. Matchmaking was always a far better experience, but the population will drop eventually, so you need the server browser.

Money. If you can host your own servers, you won’t be peer pressured to buy the latest skins.

It does.

PlayStation multiplayer games suffer when there’s no one to play with, so there’s a chance.

These days I find I’m drowning in a deluge of game releases, so even filtering those down to prioritize the ones on GOG first is a form of curation that helps. Regional pricing doesn’t affect me, but I feel for you. And there are exceptions to the multiplayer problem on GOG, which is what makes it harder than if it was just a blanket bad option for multiplayer. I’d love to see GOG implement something that allows for truly offline implementation of their Galaxy backend so that devs taking the easy porting route can still say that their game is 100% DRM-free; as it stands, I’m writing off buying a game like MechWarrior 5 on GOG.

It’s a shame, but GOG is still my default store. They make it difficult to shop for multiplayer games there though. They need to create some kind of incentive (carrot, not stick) to make sure devs keep their games in parity. They all talk about how hard it is to support multiple stores and then also complain about Steam being a monopoly. The reason they have so much market share is staring at the developers in the mirror.