I never said that a lack of dev involvement is driving people to Street Fighter 5. I just said that there is a new lack of dev involvement within this community. That’s just a fact. More evidence that the game is in decline. So don’t put words in my mouth, unless you were talking to somebody else. I also disagree with you that because there might not be a Season 4 that there is no sequel to this game. Games that have a lot of successful DLC (which is what the season model equates to) eventually do come up with sequels most of the time when a sequel rollout becomes more profitable than additions to the current game. This is the norm.
Before:
But seriously though, just hmu if you want to play Overwatch. I am usually always on. And I have Notifications when Favorites friends come on, so I see you hop on Gears and just play without hollering at ya boy 
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Yeah, not even touching the flame war above me.
Ahem, I do think it’s a little premature to say the game is dying mainly because there is currently a correlation. The player base has been down but we’ve also had a massive surge in hyped games/expansions recently. I, for one, put all my gaming time into reliving Rapture and Columbia recently with the release of the Bioshock Collection. I also have given Destiny another shot since the new expansion came out. Discounting my interests, there’s also been a WoW expansion release, GoW4, Overwatch events and gaming championships in the past couple of months, all of which will draw attention back to those games. And upcoming, we have three major shooters dropping in addition to everything else incoming.
Correlation does not prove causation, my amateur statisticians. Could KI be dying? Sure. But can we say for certain with just player numbers dropping during a highly saturated release season? No, we cannot.
And as to the people forsaking KI… nothing I say will sway you. So… I dunno… have a good day, I guess?
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Oh look, KI’s dying again. 
Better get my nice hat…
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For the last 6 months or so, I’ve been really hoping for (and requesting) a new mode I could play a friend with (LOCALLY) and thought for sure Shadow Modes multiplayer would allow for that, similar to Kustom Kombat in MKX, but sadly Shadow Lords has no option to play VS 2P. 
It looks like the 2P still has no way of signing in either, so I don’t even think I could play with them online with Shadow Lords, sitting right next to each other. frustrating.
A few things I want to address coming back to this thread:
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We are entering the Holiday Season. This is when the Big Boys come out to play. The “This Franchise is worth more than the Continent of Africa” games that are almost too big to fail, and will get millions of sales no matter how they review.
Between your big mainstream shooter titles (Gears, CoD, Battlefield, Titanfall, Overwatch) and a rerelease of SKYRIM (Fuck dude, how do you compete with “You like Skyrim? Well here’s more of it”?) there’s going to be huge swaths of people going to play other things. -
Believe it or not, a lot of the people who play games have multiple games they like. I’ve taken extended breaks from KI to play games that I was looking forward to. Fallout 4 and Doom4 both cut into my time for… Well, anything that wasn’t them, really. Over the last 3 years I’ve played tons of different games. Has that stopped me from clocking in almost 2000 hours in KI? Hell no. There are huge long running threads on these very forums about people playing other games. Does that mean those people have dropped KI too? No, most of them are still incredible players, and some of them are even KI dev team members.
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There is a difference between a community being small and the death of a game. You may be running into a lot of the same people online, for example, but that’s not exactly new in KI. Remember how nearly EVERYONE was a Killer rank player in Season 2? Now, try to play a game like Brink or Alone in the Dark: Illumination online. You’ll be lucky to find a single soul after a half hour wait. Some games don’t even have dev support anymore, or even running servers.
Yet for all the reports of the game dying (I wonder if this happens every time a new game comes out) we’re having this discussion on the official Killer Instinct website. We have a direct line with the devs. We had a patch to the game less than a day ago addressing an issue, and they’ve promised that further help is on the way. The GG’s thread still has at least 10 entries a day of people either saluting post fight or searching for matches. -
Sometimes people just leave. And that’s fine. Whenever I see “X pro player quit, the game is over!” it always makes me chuckle. Sure, we don’t have J Wong anymore, but we got Sleep and Swordsman and Circa Nicky. Even our resident KevBones made Top 16 in the recent KI Pro Cup. Sure Bass announced he’s taking a break, but he’s still helping the community in other ways.
Sometimes people leave and nothing comes of it. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t. If people no longer want to play or have other things they want to do, that’s their choice. No use making a big deal out of it.
So someone says they don’t like the game or don’t want to play anymore. If you like it, who cares what other people think? Don’t let anyone else make a choice for you.
#TL;DR-
There’s a lot of big releases this time of year, and people are going to play other games. They’re probably going to come back, but if they don’t, don’t sweat it.
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Honestly, everyone needs to chill out a bit over this stuff. Getting bitter over mean-spirited users, generalizing people as insular morons, and pointing fingers at the community gets us nowhere. It just perpetuates itself without amounting to anything.
I’m sure the developers are able to recognize real problems and do their best to address them given their resources and limitations, independent of the bad attitudes associated with much of the feedback and arguments they view. It’s not like criticism has disappeared on these forums and they don’t hear anything.
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I didn’t think you had Gears? Yeah, I should drop by more often. I will probably play Gears a bit more before moving around other games again. I really want to try that co-op mode though. Looks sick, please tell me it’s good.
- I don’t agree that this is a fact.
- I wasn’t putting words in your mouth, it was the juxtaposition of your post with ZDHome’s assertion that people were leaving for SFV.
Regarding the possibility of a sequel, this is at least something we can talk about. I don’t think KI follows the normal game +DLC model because the original game (S1) is actually smaller than each of the two DLC expansions (S1 and S2). That’s not typical - and it’s not just size it’s expense in creating them plus cost to consumers. So, yeah, if you have a commercially successful game and the DLC sells well thats an incentive not an impediment to the development of a sequel. But I don’t think that’s what KI is. I also think that introducing a seasonal model disrupts the full priced upgrade model that has been used in fighting games for at least twenty years.
Here is my interpretation of the evidence - which like everyone else’s involves a significant amount of speculation. The short version is I don’t think the game has made a lot of money. You could convince me it is breaking even, but I’d be very surprised to hear they were making a significant profit on it. So, now they have a choice. Stop, and sink a lot of money into a sequel - keeping in mind that a sequel needs to be more than just a six-eight character season or people are going to scream that it should have been a season update. Or, they could do a season 4. Or they could quit. If the game is doing well, then a Season 4 makes perfect sense especially considering they just released a long term and expandable mode in the form of Shadow Lords (which isn’t something you drop right before announcing a sequel in my opinion). If it’s not doing well, then I don’t see how a big investment in a sequel makes sense. I just don’t see it.
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I don’t have Gears yet, but looking to get it with my next paycheck.
And yes, it’s good.
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I’m taking a break from online matches until i unlock all mimic skins in shadow lords. 
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I’m taking break from play KI because of this… XD
This game is super fun!
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That’s a really fun game!
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It’s so awesome! I was trying to defeat Frank, but he’s very stronger! 
Great game. Just make sure to come back 
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I won’t quit play KI! KI is great fighting game of all time! But I want to have fun play game. 
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Hard to say, but I also know they haven’t given us very many opportunities to spend our money on their game, aside from the actual season content.
I can easily see myself, in another dimension, having spent $50 on costumes, accessories, colors and announcer packs for this game.
Aside from Shadow Jago’s standalone character, which is horribly priced and makes no sense with the rest of their model, KI is actually a pretty reasonably priced game, especially if you got into KI late and bought the season 3 ultimate edition. KI has done pretty good work setting reasonable prices for their content. If they released awesome gameplay extras for their characters and maintained this level of “reasonable price”, KI fans would have bought everything they released in droves.
But they didn’t.
And now, it’s possible the game hasn’t made a huge profit, not that we really know for sure. But I kind of put the blame for that one on whoever the decision makers are for KI’s vision and budget, not the gamers or competing games in the genre or anything like that.
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I can say, with absolute certainty, that if they had cosmetic items that are like Overwatch, League of Legends, and Street Fighter 5 costumes, I would spend some serious dough when I could. I spent hundreds of dollars on League of Legends skins, and those aren’t even that viewable save for the ones that actually change spell effects.
Just for conversation’s sake, how much would you pay for a Season X Costume pack 1? You’d get 9-8 costumes (dependent on the Season).
As ballparks, I would pay the following amounts for the following content:
Costumes: A fully-featured costume, including 3 accessory set with multiple colors and 9-10 main colors
- $3 individual
- $16 for a season of 8 or 9 chars
- $40 for a bundle of all 3 seasons worth of characters
Colors: A pack of 5 new colors for a character’s normal and retro costumes, plus 1 new color for each accessory:
- $1 individual
- $5 for a season
- $12 for all 3 seasons
The colors would be “basic” color schemes, ie, no retexturing (or, at least, recolors of existing retextures). I would also pay for “premium color” packs that involve two-tone colors for characters (ie, Cinder’s mimic skin in black and white, or red and purple or something), or stuff that needs new textures drawn. A pack of 3 for the same price as above, or a slight increase in price for a pack of 5.
Announcer packs: replaces Mike or Chris to say in-game combo lines and character names. Maybe includes their own individual flair as well (ie, instead of saying “Ready” at the start of a fight, maybe they say a similar line they are famous for, randomized between them also saying Ready in the KI style)
- $6 each (if they released classic FG announcers, or hype announcers from other games like Halo or something, I would buy them all blind)
So… right away, if over the course of the last 2 years they had released even just one new DLC costume per character, one pack of colors, and one new announcer, they’d have gotten about $60 more from me, and that’s at conservative pricing. Lots of other people would be buying them individually at inflated prices. And maybe they’d have released multiple color packs or announcers, since those seem much easier to make than costumes. (But then again, SFV has been out for 8 months and they already have 3+ costumes for each character, so maybe they’re easier to make than I think)
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