▲ Street Fighter 6 introduced various control methods to reduce barriers to entry Source: Capcom
The biggest challenge and goal of all fighting games is to attract new users. Since the genre’s image is only enjoyed by certain users, it is difficult to attract new users and success is not guaranteed, so there are only a handful of games that continue the legacy.
As a result, fighting game developers are making efforts to attract users through various attempts, but no noteworthy results have yet been achieved.
Street Fighter 6, released last year, secured a significant new user base with a new control method. It has been effective to let anyone enjoy the game easily by supporting three methods according to operating capabilities: classic, modern and dynamic. Among them, the Modern and Dynamic types have received favorable reviews from novice users for their unconventional setup that allows you to perform special moves and combos with the push of a button.
▲ Tekken 8 also introduced a special style. Source: Tekken 8 Steam store page
Even Tekken 8, which received attention alongside Street Fighter, attempted to differentiate itself with a new control method, Special Style. Signature skills, aerial combos, power smash and bottom attack functions are assigned to four buttons, helping you overcome crises simply by pressing the appropriate buttons.
Various attempts are receiving positive responses in terms of lowering barriers to entry. The process of protecting the number of concurrent users when releasing a new work is very important in terms of topicality and data protection, and both the recently released Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 have achieved success.
In particular, there is a tendency to introduce convenience features as essential in PvP games, where the gap between experts and beginners can widen by the time of release. The importance of complex convenience features that help you adapt to the game while highlighting the unique fun of the genre comes to the fore.
However, behind the results achieved there are also obvious limitations. Users acquired by lowering the barrier to entry do not lead to retention figures. In fact, Tekken 8’s current number of concurrent users is 15,123, a drop of more than half from 46,139 on release day.
The completeness of the convenience features and the specificity of the genre are cited as reasons why the various attempts do not lead to an increase in the retention rate. While it is effective for users who are new to the genre, it only serves as an introduction and does not help develop intermediate or higher skills or increase immersion.
Tekken 8’s special style makes it easy to use the series’ main aerial combos, but the pattern is set up so you can easily predict the next attack. Furthermore, it is not easy to win in PvP mode with a particular style because there are many variables that determine the game, such as map tricks and lateral movement.
As new products continue to make efforts to reduce barriers to entry and overcome limitations, the importance of convenient and convenient functions tailored to the user’s situation is expected to become more and more evident. It’s time to go beyond simply easing the difficulty of certain functions and add details to master them step by step.
For example, the modern type of Street Fighter 6 tried to differentiate itself by increasing the damage of special moves when directly entering commands so that novice users can have fun and practice command input. The choice to provide a bridge between dynamic and classic typologies may seem cumbersome at first glance, but it has maintained a higher retention rate than Tekken 8 despite approaching its first year of release.
The volume of new works becomes larger and larger and the system also becomes more complex. In a situation where the elimination of barriers to entry has become an important criterion for users to choose new games, it is necessary to further diversify the development of useful functions for new and inexperienced users.
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