I agree in regards to fighting game fans, they would defend any game. In regards to the millions of gamers who wouldn't touch a fighting game unless it was basically free: no. They have driven themselves down into one of the worst holes they've ever been in. I mean you're over here bragging about the state of a genre dominated by e-currencies and featuring in game advertisements. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars of DLC. Some franchises just resell the same game repeatedly like EA.

Fighting games have all homgonized mechanically/aesthetically and are all competing for who can have the most predatory business models. Design wise, theyve become backwards, lazy, and inaccessible farces compared to their lineage. Almost always paper thin content, almost always day 1 DLC. Identical huds, identical sound design - stunlock to juggle to cutscene attack inside an invisible box. Watching Soul Calibur be destroyed like this was heartbreaking. Even Tekken has finally bent the knee and added power meters and cutscene attacks. It's all just crappy Dragonballz knockoffs now. Let's not even get into how they avoid teaching people how to play them even after decades.

The shortest and most simple example of how backwards things have gone would be to say that the entire genre dealt with touch of death combos by tripling health values and building their entire systems around them. As such, nearly every franchise is like watching an Irish river dance battle, but with Dragonballz cosplayers. We could break down nearly every facet of modern fighting games in this way because it's all gone wrong.

Fighting games are now in the same tier of games as John Madden football and MMORPGs. The bottom one. Maybe sf6 (actually 14) and Tekken 8 (actually 12) will change these problems, but all footage just shows them pandering to the same base and making the same hollow promises. Maybe sf6 will have a comprehensive single player or maybe it will be a garbage throwaway campaign that points you to a cash shop, ranked mode, and a training dummy. Maybe the accessibility feature will help draw in new players, or maybe it's a throwaway marketing tool that is nullified the moment someone steps out of training mode (common in many fighting games).