EVO has it really figured out, and you have to hand it to Mr. Wizard and the crowd he runs with for not only starting a fighting game tournament way back in the early 2000s when nobody was playing fighting games, but keeping it alive for when the genre would return en vogue. This has given EVO a unique opportunity to not only be a battleground for the biggest and best players, but also a sort of semi-conference for the non-competitive fan. Panel discussions take place. Dealer tables are on exhibition. Major game announcements. If you really dig fighting games, EVO is your annual summer pilgrimage to Mecca.
What I found most interesting this year was the unveiling of Ultra Street Fighter IV. While the internet at large knew that SFIV was getting another round of tweaks in the near future, I doubt that a lot of folks saw the addition of five extra characters to an already loaded game coming. I call that a nice package for $15 DLC, but I didn't used to think so. No, this kind of shit used to get my no-nos in a twist.
Here's why: Capcom, smarmy minx that it tends to be, is notorious for nickel and dime-ing its customers. When Street Fighter II was success, they made updates for it. When Resident Evil was at its height, they played the spinoff game until it was close to irrelevance. The point is, Capcom is a great company that has a history of not leave well enough alone. A further update to Street Fighter IV, now four years old on the console side, looks to be the same thing. Former Capcom employee and fighting game czar Seth Killian even said of the v.2012 update that they were done messing with the game, which (by no fault of his) turns out to be a bald-faced lie. So why flip sides and decide that it's a fine plan?
Two things, really: a little honesty and a whole lot of common sense, which are two things that I appreciate more than bagels and coffee in bed. Capcom has not been on its best legs over the past few years, and the last week has shown it. A company restructuring is taking place, and US senior VP Christian Svensson opted to resign amidst the round of layoffs. That could mean a ton of things, but my personal favorite close-to-the-truth conjecture is that lots of past passion projects for the company (like an under performing Darkstalkers rerelease) just didn't pan out like they thought they would, and a company rejiggering will halt development of extensions of those projects, like oft-rumored sequels. It's sad, but that's business. Plus, larger developers and publishers have to get some things finished for the new consoles that are going to drop by the end of the year, so they don't really have a lot of time and money to toss around.
Case in point, this tweet by Street Fighter series producer (and loveable kook) Yoshinori Ono:
I don't have R&D budget and staff who they're just only make USF4.RT @MC_Odd: @warmlettuce Are you secretly working on a SF V for next gen?
— Yoshinori Ono (@Yoshi_OnoChin) July 15, 2013
Still, they are throwing resources at updating a four year old game, and it will fundamentally change it. All characters will have tweaks to their move sets, and five new characters (even though 80% of them are taken straight from another game) drastically alters the landscape of any fighting game, especially if even one or two of them is accepted as tournament-level competitive by the fan base. To me, this is a sign that the developer is going through some hard times, but they haven't turned their back on their customers. Sure, it still seems a little dumb from a casual perspective that they're adding on to a game that will be five years old when Ultra finally arrives, but from a different perspective, Ono's transparency buys him a little bit of good will. At least from me, anyway.
Today's homework is for you to read The Psychology of Steam's Summer Sale over on the The Psychology of Video Games (which is a website I've only become familiar with recently). I was just having a conversation with a friend about the horn of plenty that Steam becomes when the weather turns oppressively hot. This turns out to be eerily timely. Stay tuned for more Tomb Dater later this week. I think so, anyway...
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