Olivia Richman is a seasoned esports journalist who has worked with Inven Global, Esports Illustrated, Esports.gg, and more. As an editor and writer at Esports Insider, she loves telling unique esports stories, especially within the FGC. When not working and gaming, Olivia loves collecting Kirby plush, eating sushi, and driving her cars at the track.
The fighting game community has a gatekeeping problem. When Evo attempted to bring in a mainstream gaming audience by inviting streamers to have showmatches at the large fighting game event, the FGC reacted with rage.
The FGC wants things to be authentic, genuine, and passionate. They only want streamers at the event who actually care about the fighting game scene. And at the crux of it is an ongoing issue that the FGC won’t really say out loud: the streamers are not good at the game. They only respect those who can play at a high level. Those who excel at difficult games.
The FGC has always emphasized the importance of pulling off difficult combos, of mastering a tricky character, of applauding incredible tech skills. Games are more respected when they’re seen as complex and have a high skill ceiling. Games that newer fans can’t really keep up with or understand while watching because of the nuanced mechanics.
I’m here to say that fighting games don’t have to be hard to be good. But why has this even become such a big part of the fighting game scene?
Fighting game culture can be a bit old-school. It’s rooted in a lot of tradition. This is often where the gatekeeping can come from. Long-time players and fans remember the days of playing Street Fighter in an arcade. They remember the legends of the 1990s , competing in California for bragging rights alone.
Jeannail “Cuddle_Core” Carter has been in the Tekken scene for 15 years . She told Esports Insider that she remembers a time when there weren’t tutorials all over YouTube, Reddit threads discussing frame data, and combo trial modes. You had to really dig in and practice to figure things out. You had to compete alongside international pros to learn from them.
“Resources to get better were so limited, it became a part of what’s considered the ‘grind.’ That mindset has evolved in some ways, but the greats referenced like ‘they had to go through it, they had to do that.’ So the struggle has to exist!” Cuddle_Core explained.
It’s sorta like the old “I suffered to get where I am, so you should suffer too” mentality. These early 2000s fighting game pros dedicated their lives to working out insane combos and uncovering new tech.
In the Smash community, there has long been a rivalry between the Melee and Ultimate scenes. Melee is much older, and so are the players (for the most part). They played back when they had to find out crazy strategies and broken tech on their own, before there were streamers and coaches to break it down for you online. You had to be dedicated .
Jason “Mew2King” Zimmerman notoriously studied and documented every single Melee character’s frame data, knockback physics, and hitboxes. He is credited with making tons of discoveries over the years by testing the game religiously, even determining the priority for almost every combination of attacks as well as characters’ falling speeds and weight.
Melee is simpler than Ultimate on the surface, but it’s that very simplicity that has created…