Did Street Fighter V deserve their Best Fighting Game of 2016 award?

Off-Topic
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It’s a pretty straightforward question. I didn’t watch them this evening because i was pulling my hair out. But when i heard Street Fighter V was Best Fighting Game of 2016, i was torn between being surprised and not surprised.

I wasn’t surprised because it’s Sony and Capcom throwing their money and weight, respectively, at the title. A la Capcom Pro Tour this weekend and the events leading to it. Plus, it’s got a player base that know the game, the characters, the lore just off of a glance. Ken, Ryu, Chun-Li, Guile and a few other Street Fighter characters are pretty commonly known outside of the FGC. And that isn’t small bones. That’s not something, i think, that could be said of the other games on the list outside of maybe Terry Bogard in KOF.

What did surprise me about Street Fighter V winning was just how wrecked of a game it was in the beginning, and how it’s STILL recovering. I have to wonder if a game that went out and did what it did … missed sales, infuriated players, the 8 frames of lag, rage quit issues, debatable censorship, so on and so forth. It did all of that, yet it was still the winner. Each of the other games had their issues and limits too, not saying it was ‘rigged’ per se. (Looking at you Nintendo, and how two fan made Nintendo game went ghost off the nomination list…) But i do wonder how a game that had that much vinegar at the start of its life, gets such high prestige.

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Name recognition and legacy advantage. When you think of a fighting game, SF is the first thing that would come to a lot of people’s minds. Plus most if not all of the issues you said about the game are only truly recognizable among those in the FGC which, as a whole compared to other genres, is pretty niche.

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Its all politics. Thats how world rolls

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No.

(And I don’t care that KI didn’t win, nor do I care about the VG awards in general)

I care because of what it makes Capcom and other developers think. It is a tacit endorsement that everything Capcom did this year is not only okay, but to be celebrated as both best in class and the best we can hope for. That makes me extremely sad as a fighting gamer.

Why would you try and do better if your weakest effort wins “best of the year”? Maybe literal rootkits on every user’s PC, a totally incomplete package with horrific UI design, long unstable servers and terrible netcode is okay if you have I-guess-it’s-alright gameplay and money to throw at a pro tour.

Blech. Again, I don’t care about KI (or any other game) winning or losing, but I do care that it sends an absolutely reprehensible message to Capcom that this ■■■■■■■■■ effort is not only pardonable, but worth awards.

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Nitroplus Blasterz: Heroines Infinite Duel got robbed.

(Also what Infil said.)

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The question to ask, is who actually voted for the games nominated

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All of what he said, line for line. Normalizing or accepting what Capcom did with SFV cannot happen. My only hope is that taking it on the chin in sales matters more to them than the validation of whoever decided these awards.

If this were any other SF (well except maybe SF: The Movie), I’d have no problem with it winning because they’re all, by and large, great games.

But not SFV. Make no mistake, that game has been riddled with scandals and subpar decision making from its terrible launch up through that little rootkit oops a while back. Mediocre character design, minimal modes, poor netcode, having to grind to unlock characters you’ve already paid for, charging full price for about a quarter of a game…

A game with the name Street Fighter has to mess up pretty bad to draw the ire of gamers and gaming journalists, but this one checked all the boxes and got walloped for it, which is at least partially why it sold so poorly and why the Game Informers and Giant Bombs of the world pulled no punches on podcasts or in reviews, where it got more than a few sevens and sixes.

But fast forward to today and apparently all is forgotten because hey, it still has Ryu and Ken so… Eh, whatever. Sadly, I sincerely doubt the people voting had any idea about any of that stuff.

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I don’t know what the criteria would be, but I would echo the sentiment from @Infilament and @Iago407. How bad would a SF game have to be to NOT win game of the year?

Everyone has their own style and gameplay preferences. But it is a technically unimpressivepiece of work. A small number of characters, limited modes focusing on online competitive play but with meh netcode. The gameplay is definitely solid but its really difficult to say it is doing much if anything to advance the series.

The only thing it has going for it is popularity in the SFC, I mean FGC. But if popularity with Street Fighter players is the metric for success in the awards then SF will always win. I’m

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Others already nailed, so I’m just going too keep it simple:

SFV didn’t deserved it. It’s a bad product. It launched with multiple issues which mantained for months. It introduced spyware on Pcs with an update. Poor netcode. Poor way to unlock stuff, frustratring players. Non-existant one player content on launch.

I could go on, but at the end, it’s simple: It’s SF. They are going to win. Probably who voted this are not FG players, just regular players who doesn’t understand FGs deeply

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But this is the weird thing; SF5 also reviewed poorly in the mainstream gaming media. Most people agree that it was a game that had a ton of promise, and maybe will be good in another 12-18 months, but is very hard to recommend right now.

And when you think about games with problems that do well, usually you can point to at least ONE thing that is really good. Like, “oh I don’t mind so much that game X has all these problems, because they really got Y perfect”. What is that thing for SFV? Its gameplay is… okay, I guess. Some like it, but it’s nothing to write home about, and it didn’t make people think about fighting games in some new way.

So yeah, a game that the mainstream media didn’t like, a game with tons of bad press throughout the year (not just at launch)… how can it win FG of the year? Even if they don’t like it and are just saying “it’s not great, but it’s better than all the other games that were nominated” then that is REALLY depressing for fighting game fans. While tons of other genres are being pushed forward with progressive developer ideas, our game of the year is the game that sent us backwards.

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The most known name won Best Fighter despite being a ■■■■ game overall. Shocker.

Anime games will never win no matter how good it is.
KI will never win despite how good it is.

This is the world we live in where the most known name will always win despite how low it became. Oh well. It’s a shame but know that these awards ultimately don’t matter as a small minority of people who even watched it will even buy the game(s) that won.

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Yeah, but I expected Pokken to win. A game that vastly outsold and outreviewed SFV and is based on an IP that is much bigger than Street Fighter. I wouldn’t expect some indie fighter or “good but low key” game like KoF to win.

Again, this has nothing to do with me or others wanting our favorite game to win. To me it’s just about the message that is being sent to Capcom, whose executives and budget deciders probably care a lot more about awards like this than actual gamers do: “what you’re doing is great, keep it up”. That message really scares me for the future of the genre.

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Agree. It’s sad, because everything pointed into “failure”.

Cons:
-Bad reviews
-Didn’t achieved to sell the expected copies by Capcom
-Horrorific launch issues
-Bad UI
-Etc…

Pros:
-As you say, OK gameplay. Ok, not GREAT

IDK, may be biased here, but SFV is just… nothing special. It’s what I call a “catalog videogame”: A videogame that is not the best in it’s genre, but still can give you some entertainment. But that doesn’t make it great. Just… average

It’s kinda sad that this is the game which takes the adward. The message it sends it’s just discouraging

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Nope. But, I knew it would. I mean it’s obvious, who didn’t see that coming? Street Fighter is more recognizable and can generate the most revenue outside of just game sales. They basically dominated the fighting game fanbase followed by Mortal Kombat. At least in popularity it does.

I honestly, really, wanted Pokken to win. I voted for KI because my loved for the game and the hard work of the community members along the awesome developers, but Pokken did deserve it outside of Street Fighter.

Street Fighter may have solid gameplay with controversial fundamental changes, like light aa’s, what the hell, but it will never be fun unless it has a major overhaul. I desperately wanted to like it, but my gosh it’s so dull and lacking that oomph that makes a fighting game.

Whatever, though, like Max said, at least they even have a fighting game category. Even if we will most likely always see major title take it.[quote=“Infilament, post:12, topic:16518”]
Yeah, but I expected Pokken to win. A game that vastly outsold and outreviewed SFV and is based on an IP that is much bigger than Street Fighter.
[/quote]

Yes, that may be so but Pokken isn’t that big outside of being Pokemon. If you compete with games that are based on the style of traditional Pokemon games, you can’t beat them. Pokken is great, fun, and even outsold SF, but who really knows it? I challenge you to go to 5-10 random people and I assure you more of them will recognize Street Fighter opposed to the name Pokken.

It sucks dude, mostly because they played the creative process super safe and won an undeserving award. Politics.

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Not gonna lie, this feels like if No Man’s Sky had gotten GOTY based solely off of the hype train/sales, despite its underwhelming, overpriced release.
This going to be coming from a guy who’s played next-to-no Street Fighter… But is it just me, or is SFV the least entertaining iteration? The other SFV games I’ve watched people play (namely Third Strike and Ultra SF4) are just infinitely more fun to watch.

Just looking at SFV, the characters lost so much of the impact and ferocity they used to have. Everything feels like its in Slow-Mo. It just seems so… Clunky.

Maybe I’m a bit biased because KI is the only fighting game I’ve taken seriously apart from some Mortal Kombat phases (and let’s face it, Killer Instinct is a very special sort of crazy) but SFV just feels so …underwhelming just looking at it.

These sort of awards shows are 90% self congratulations among the elite. That’s the way it’s been with the Oscars and Music awards forever (example: Jethro Tull snubbed Metallica for the first ever Best Metal Performance Grammy. Let that sink in)

I’m not surprised. I’m not even angry. I’m just… Disappointed.

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The game awards in general were pretty bad, as they usually are. SFV taking best fighting game is entirely expected and still terrible. Aside from SFV I think pokken would have been the most unsurprising winner, considering it’s the only release without any kind of controversy in the category–the early PC issues for KI, the graphics for KOF, and the everything for SF.

Beyond that though, I think overwatch being nominated for game of the year is bad, let alone winning and also taking the best studio and best multiplayer awards. I like overwatch, but the only award it might deserve is best marketing. That game is like an 8, tops.

Doom taking best sound design isn’t as bad, but rez infinite getting recognition as best VR game without recognition for the sound design and music feels really weird. Not to say doom doesn’t deserve the award, it just feels…off.

One thing I actually really like is blood and wine taking best RPG of the year. I haven’t played it yet, but if it’s on par with the quality of the main campaign of witcher 3 then it definitely earned that win. I think it’s good that great post-launch content can get recognition without being shoved off to the side in its own category. Like, if your game wouldn’t have won over the witcher in 2015, why should it win over it in 2016 just because the release was an expansion?

I want to not care about the game awards but they obviously matter considering how big they are and I just think the fact that titanfall 2 didn’t win ANY of the categories it was nominated for is pretty lame. It stings especially because it went up against overwatch, a game I think is a worse product overall and also easily a worse multiplayer experience, in the same genre. Sort of, anyway. We’ve got a running joke on my overwatch team where overwatch is a shooter whenever EU wins something, and a MOBA whenever SK wins something.

The award for best performance is unsurprising but not undeserved, I imagine. I haven’t played uncharted 4, but let’s be real: Nolan North is an industry veteran, and a consistently good voice actor. There’s a reason he gets so much work.

Pokemon go winning best mobile/handheld is probably the worst thing of all, though. I think putting those two together into one category is questionable already, and a non-game that launched with non-functioning features winning over, like…real games? That’s just bad.

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Uncharted 4 is very good, if you like that style of game. Set pieces were strong, villain was about as believable as possible. Every 5 seconds Nathan Drake does something that would kill any man, like jumping 10 stories down and grabbing on a rock the size of your fist with one hand, and you eventually just get numb to it, but it’s fun.

(I know all Uncharted games have Drake doing stuff like that, but it seems especially common in this game)

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Everything Drake touches, is destroyed

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I don’t think that it’s coincidence that the game that took Game of the Year took Best E-Sports Game of the Year. Street Fighter V was a nominee for GOTY as well, and i’d put that squarely on the back of the Capcom Pro Tour and the payout at the end of the season.

Maybe it’s the new ‘awards meta,’ just like characters in a fighting game. If your characters are not winning tournaments, they’re not top-tier? (Supposedly, mind you.) Perhaps if your games are not showcasing tournaments, it’s not Game of the Year mentionable.

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Yeah I didn’t expect KI to win. As long as they’re in the seasonal model, I’ll be really surprised if they beat out a full game. If we do get a season 4, I don’t expect it to outduel Tekken 7 at next year’s awards and that’s okay. I’m sure Tekken 7 will be great (if likely somewhat derivative), and even though I’d love it if KI got the recognition it absolutely deserves, that’s just the reality of situation and I’m not salty over it.

I also expected Pokken to win, but in the back of my mind, I thought “SF will win because it’s SF” and that’s not okay when the game doesn’t measure up. The worst part is that KI, a seasonal model game, lost to a full priced game that only had about a quarter of the content that it should’ve had, so in essence, KI Season 3 lost to a game with a similar amount of content anyways, which makes it doubly frustrating that KI can’t get any love when SF can get awards simply by showing up.

The fact that it reviewed so poorly makes it even more confusing to me. I mean, they said that part of those picking are in the mainstream gaming media, if I’m not mistaken. Weren’t these the exact same people railing against the game and how it was more or less scamming consumers? And then they go and give it the award over Pokken, KOF and KI. It’s messed up.