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Realistically what do you think Skullgirls' life span is after the last DLC?

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What do you think is the life span of Skullgirls after the last DLC is released?
In my opinion...
a couple months to 1 year for the Casual crowd
2-3 years for the Competative crowd (1 year at worst though)
 
If they keep updateing afterwards, Id say 5 years.
 
6-8 Months for the casual crowd (Your stream)

Like maybe 2 - 5 years for competitive unless this whole Fukua/Peacock LNLH fad and mash supers thing keeps going.
Who knows, it's really hard to say.

Would be nice to pick up some well known players from other games once Marvel 3 dies though, or some of the Marvel 2 vets.
 
10+years in competitive scene (see sf2, 3 or marvel 2)

Maybe we won't have any stream for EVO side tournaments, but the game will live on with the respect and honest attitude the team has shown to the players and as an example of "player-developer" synergy and design done right: never before a fighting game got so many feedback straight from the players (also Mike used his experience for good in small details, like preventing an accidental touch in the start button to ruin a competitive match or the optimal input config in character select)

That without counting the amazing art, characters and world it presented to us

Worst case scenario, DDB will pull the hype train by hand if needed until Annie is in the game
 
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Game is already dead or struggling on a competitive level.

I give it 6 months after full release before it becomes even smaller to non existent competitively.

I give the tumblr community or year or so after full release and than they'll leave when they realize that no more lore will happen, they will also quit when they realize no more character polls will happen for characters they weren't going to play regardless.
 
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I guess the main questions I'd pose before trying to guess any timelines are:
  1. Do you see the SG community growing between now and the last update? Could more new people be attracted if updates stop after Robo-Fortune?
    • My uninformed guess would be that there is about a solid year and some change left for development of Beowulf, Robo-fortune, and any other patches L0 would want to roll out. During that time do you see the community being able to draw in more new blood?
    • Keep in mind that the PS4 and Vita ports may attract a larger audience.
  2. Do you think that SG has a lasting appeal?
    • Does the current roster seem like one that has lasting appeal? This goes beyond visual aesthetics or lore and more towards gameplay. With variable team sizes and a (as of now) final roster size of 14 characters, do you think that new players and current players will keep coming back to the game for it's mechanics?
    • Focusing on lore and characters, the inevitable blue-balls some players will feel for not having access to a "true" story mode is also a negative factor. The IGG campaign revealed that a significant portion of players mainly play the single player campaign which means that they aren't playing multiplayer which is what SG needs most to stay alive.
  3. Can the community gain more presence at the tournament scene?
    • To date one of the biggest criticisms I've seen of SG by higher level players is that people don't go to tournaments. This happens for a number of reasons but sufficed to say not having a tournament presence hurts the game.
    • While not trying to put the game in direct competition with other longer running fighters like UMvC3, Guilty Gear, KOF, Smash, etc; all of which have been around for years and benefit from large rosters and fan familiarity. What is SG doing to hammer out a niche for itself to expand from in the tournament scene.
      • Since I can only really participate in online tournaments during the best of circumstances I have no idea how the tourney scene for most FG's actually work in this capacity.
 
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Just wanna say that SG pioneered in community feedback and set a bar for future fighting games (thanks KI), and even if the game itself doesn't last as much, this player-developer relationship hopefully will.
 
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People like me will easily forget it in a year or so. Sometimes we'll say "Boy, Skullgirls was a great game" and that's it. But I'm sure there's still gonna be a little group of american players that will keep up their little glorious tournaments. They're gonna play Skullgirls till they die, and I wish them the best of luck.
 
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I don't think the casual community will ever truly leave the game.
I mean, they'll stop playing right after they finish Robo-Fortune's story mode and'll only pick it back up to replay their favorite character's story mode and maybe fact check something, but the game has enough artistic direction and good aesthetic for people to remember it and make fan art and take screenshots and gifs and that kind of thing.

I don't have enough experience with competitive fg communities to take a realistic guess at that though.
 
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I think it all depends on if it is picked back up by major tourneys again. This game need some time to build momentum back up to attract players. ..it needs visibility. EVO could have done it, but we know how that went. .im still pulling for a SG precence at EVO 15.
 
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I haven't been part of the fighting game community long enough to be able to judge these kinds of things, however, its important to note that Skullgirls' art-style will be memorable enough to cause players to return at somepoint
 
One of the things I've noticed about this game is how similar SG's situation is to SFxT's situation. Both games had terrible launches, but both games also gave updates that made themselves really solid and fun games. But regardless of the updates, everyone in the FGC has made up their minds about both games one way or another a loooooong time ago.

The only thing that separates the two games is that, while Capcom tried to cash-grab and nickle-and-dime their customers with SFxT, Lab Zero has done everything possible to do right by their fans and the FGC, making constant updates, giving new characters away for free and going to the point of making drivers to make PS3 sticks compatible with PS4 sticks. That, in my mind, is the main reason why SG is still clinging to life while SFxT is dead as far as I can see.

About the future of this game relative to the rest of the field, I'll list a bunch of assumptions here:

- Marvel 3 is not going to die. Guys like Viscant, F-Champ, and the House of Chaos will make sure that it won't die. As much as I don't like that game, I have to give their community all the credit in the world for giving all of their blood, sweat and tears to keeping their game alive.

- If any Marvel 2 veterans haven't picked up SG at this point, they probably aren't going to now or in the future. Again, they've made up their minds about SG already.

- Xrd and the US version of UNIEL are on the horizon. Then we have to consider what'll happen once a new KOF comes out... there's no way SG can compete at that point.

- When Indiegogo funding runs out, MikeZ can't update the game anymore. Yes, it's uncertain now, but for now I'll just assume that Mike has to move on once RoboFortune comes out.

With this in mind, 10+ years is a bit too much to expect... I'd give the competitive scene 6 months once Robo Fortune comes out.
 
I feel like as long as people keep playing the game online, the game will survive in some form or another for a long time. GGPO netcode is a godsend in that department.

The tournament scene, such as it is, will probably be reduced to only EVO and maybe one or two other majors pretty quickly.
 
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I stopped playing this game towards the end of vanilla because it was too hard to find matches. Once SDE came out people started playing again and I picked the game back up. So, I guess I'll keep playing it as long as there are other people to play against. Hopefully some other people feel the same way.
 
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DDB said:
I take this task upon myself.
Count me in!

But honestly, the game's already dead... Sad but true. What we should be wondering is what Lab Zero will do next, and when Alex is going to make a movie.
 
I think next year's EVO is going to be the last big EVO for a while. But I think that we'll end up in a melee type situation and just have a recession for a bit. Most of the people who complain about the state of the game (and yet still play it) will finally stop playing altogether and after a bit, we'll just move on to a new generation of players.

Nobody here in Norcal has the intention of dropping this game for a long, long time. I plan on sustaining that scene (and anyone else on the west coast) for as long as I can.

If we don't want this game to die, then it's completely up to us.
 
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It's not already dead?

In one of the largest metroplexes in the US, we can't even have proper tournaments for the game -- we can only have casual setups at tournaments -- because we can't get eight people to enter. There's a grand total of four Skullgirls players in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area, one of whom I've never even seen in person.

If that's not dead, I don't know what is.

There will probably be a small online scene just by virtue of being the only recent airdasher on PC (I think the only other legal/official ones are Melty and BBCT? Melty is kind of a crap game anyways, and its netcode was awful...), but French Bread or ASW could easily extinguish even that on a whim by putting out a UNIEL/GGXrd/BBCP/P4U port.
 
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463px-Facepalm.png
 
Thrasher08 said:
The community doesn't leave until Robo-Annie
When's Robo-Annie?
 
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I've been hearing SG is a dead game for months. All the people I play daily must not be real.

Hell, I bet none of you are real.

And they say schizophrenia ain't fun.
 
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People will start animating their favorite characters on their own. Oh wait that's already happened.
 
Muro said:
I've been hearing SG is a dead game for months. All the people I play daily must not be real.

Hell, I bet none of you are real.

And they say schizophrenia ain't fun.
Going by that standard, no fighting game in history has ever died (I'm sure there's someone out there playing Bikini Karate Fighters as I type this), so that seems like a bad standard to go by.
 
Cynical said:
Going by that standard, no fighting game in history has ever died (I'm sure there's someone out there playing Bikini Karate Fighters as I type this), so that seems like a bad standard to go by.

I'm pretty sure Muro is talking about online gaming. Which yeah kinda keeps the game alive
 
Online play is a bad measure to use for fighting games (plus, as the only person in the thread to say "it's already dead", I did mention that online play will probably persist for a while).

Hell, by that measure, BBCT was "still alive" into BBCS:EX's lifespan, possibly longer.
 
I'd like to know why online playing doesn't matter, then.
 
chickenwithtie said:
I'd like to know why online playing doesn't matter, then.
Because even when a games online component falls off, people can still play the offline versus mode on their own.
Personal example, for years the only version of Guilty Gear I owned was AC+ for the Wii. That game was a stable fighter in my dorm lobby for about two years alongside Brawl (offline) and BlazBlue (also Offline).
 
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