Will Fighting Games Ever be Mainstream?

When people talk about video game history, they usually love calling this industry "young", as if it hasn't been going for over 60 years at this point. People who call it young haven't even been born yet, and in some cases, not even their parents!

This matters because time matters. We all live on a timer, and we as people dictate what's popular. When we're gone or become irrelevant, the times change and the tastes change with them. Classical music used to be all the rage back in the 18th century. Both dukes and peasants would go out there on the neon lit dance floors to break it down to Bach's fresh and funky tunes.

Skip forward a few hundred years, and the classical compositions are replaced by the block rocking electronic beats of Chemical Brothers or MF DOOM's contagious bio-rhymes. Movies were much the same. Dramas used to be all the rage, back when people could scarcely understand how someone managed to shove all those actors inside a little television set. Now it's more about the ultra-high budget superhero movies and other action films.

You think games are any different? We also have the most popular genres shift now and then. From platformers and RPGs to shooters, MOBAs, and Battle Royales. Competitive multiplayer games occupy the top spots in the popularity charts, fighting games are among those top positions then, surely.

Oh, if only. The spotlight always shifts in every industry, but you know what remains the same? More complicated, experimental, and polarizing genres tend to always remain in the shadow. Harsh noise will never be played in your shopping mall. You won't have your co-worker asking if you've seen River of Fundament by the water cooler, but maybe, just maybe they will ask you if you play Tekken.

Fighting games typically avoided the mainstream attention due to their hyper-competitive nature, unusual controls relative to more popular genres, and relatively high difficulty curve, but that didn't stop Street Fighter and Tekken from raking in millions of players, so maybe there is a chance? Maybe fighting games could be mainstream?

In our latest video, we discuss the possibility of it, while also going over the various things that might need to happen for... well, for that to happen. Give it a watch if you have a few minutes and tell us how you feel!