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Worst part is that the fighting game community is currently in its “esports era” or as some would call it, the “aggressive promotion era,” so no matter how bad the game is, people will promote it and abandon the old game anyway. This isn’t even a particularly new issue, either, as when VF5 was still getting updated, in the Japanese community, if players made negative comments about the game on social media, Sega would usually delete them. Sure, I suppose that it’s within their rights to remove a “I dislike the new balance patch” posts from their own social media, but my point is that it created a positive space through stricter moderation. Apparently many didn’t like this, as 5 began to wane in popularity over time. To the point where even when it was getting updated, it was nowhere big as Tekken 6 or even Tag 2 if I recall correctly. It was probably still bigger than Soulcalibur and definitely bigger than DOA in Japan, but I think it started to lose relevance around that time. And yet the people left playing VF still continued to play 5 over a previous entry since that was the one they were playing in Tougeki, the Beat Tribe Cup, et cetera. They had no real reason to go back to previous ones even if they liked them more.
And I say all of this as someone that considers Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown to be their favorite 3d fighting game. Even if I personally like it, I can see how those things could set a worrisome precedent. “I like this thing, so I’ll just look past the potentially bad situation this could cause in the future based on how easily others accepted it.” Because in the future when they make a thing that I don’t like, they’ve already established that they can do whatever they want to without much pushback.
But really, the big issue with just dismissing criticisms is that at a certain point, you may have more platitudes than players.
