>>502735140You'll probably think I'm joking, but Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, and various other social media caused this.
The reason that fighting games are generally more aggressive to begin with is for the same reason, actually. So first, I have to go off into a tangent about that. Fighting games cost more and more to make now because companies spend on more complex graphics that end up very expensive. Because of that, they have to get a huge amount of people buying to get a profit. The days of having a "modest success" with a million or two sales have basically ended for AAA games. Now you need to sell like 4 or 5 million copies to make your money back. For example, Star Wars Outlaws sold 1 or 2 million copies. That sounds good, right? Well, it cost 200 million to make, so they actually lost money on it. Or if you want an older example, Too Human sold about 1 million copies, but it cost around 100m to make and had 10 years of production time. Anyway, since games have to be massive hits now to make the cash back they spent on them, they can't just have a niche product anymore. They rely heavily on the fan interaction and look at what the masses want. So when they see the Twitch Chat looking bored when two characters are trying to approach each other, they decide to over-correct and make the whole game into a very aggressive 50/50 fest where neutral is over as quickly as possible. Universally. for every character.
Anyway, because of this culture that inflates the importance of social media, this has now trickled down to fighting games made by smaller companies as well. It doesn't help that the FGC basically lived on Twitter for over a decade. So now games are made to the whims of those people.
Twitch and Twitter people go crazy over big combos, so these developers decide to make their entire game like that so they can attract that crowd. They don't have the same budget problem, but they have the same social media problem.
