But you also need the hardcore players to give the game good word of mouth just like casual fans do in order for their friends etc. to say, ok, I've got to pick that game up.
The problem Dead or Alive as a series has is it's always been marketed as a Casual Fighting game. Tecmo confirmed this not only to me, but yourself as well. That it was because of the strides we had been taking that they were marketing Dead or Alive 4 as a hardcore fighting game. Unfortunately, the hardcore fighting fans were in a consensus that the game was far from being a hardcore fighting game, and as such ended up selling worse than any of its three previous iterations.
I nice comparison in this day and age is not only Street Fighter IV, but Mortal Kombat 9 as well. The first obviously had that perfect storm come about: It was 10 years since the last Street Fighter, arcades were now dead in the United States, and those kids had now grown up enough to reflect on nostalgia. They even reverted the game to a similar play style of SF2 - not picture perfect but similar style nonetheless. The latter (Mortal Kombat 9, to reiterate) has also been a blockbuster hit. MK9 is probably ab etter example since after the arcade die out they had not been making hardcore fighting game players a target in their design. They purposely were designing with a casual target audience in mind, and the game showed. Sure, like the DOA Community you had players who did take it hardcore, but it hardly sold to these audiences and casual users were starting to show brand fatigue from it. Then, due to the success of Street Fighter IV mainly, they decided to make their next version with the hardcore fighting game player in mind and they are certainly reaping their rewards. Not only did they design it with the target audience of a hardcore fighting game player, they were updating their game to compete with the changes the fighting game genre has added since their last hardcore game, showed A+ community involvement, amazing marketing for the game to bring in even the casual players who still just wanted another Mortal Kombat with blood and guts flying, post-release community involvement, and even flying players into their own studio to balance test (location test) the game to help get opinions from a hardcore fighting game player.
All this is well and good for NRS and Capcom, however, how does it relate to DOA? Well, in my personal opinion, the Dead or Alive franchise has been stagnant since DOA2. It hit a hardcore fighter appeal high in DOA3 (ending up to sell 6.5 million copies world wide) that also was picked up by casual gamers who to this day still tell me DOA3 looks just as good as DOA4 to them. However, the series needs to grow, and continuing to pander to the casual audience like they have for the past three Dead or Alive releases won't take them any farther than they already are heading. Again, it is of my opinion that the casual audience is fine with good looking, fluid, fighting game with lots of characters and unlockables. You focus the fighting system on the hardcore - as the casual won't care if Jann Lee's 66K is +1 or -35, all they care about is that the Dragon Kick looks f'n amazing when you knock a player off a cliff. By actually marketing to the hardcore audience, they in-turn will have more exposure for the game to have a casual audience become attracted to it - and maybe even join the hardcore scene in their own small (or large) steps. This series is different from the Street Fighter brand of fighting games, where a huge chunk of their audience was of the hardcore type. Where DOA has room to grow is in that hardcore type, my personal take is that the casual market is as good as the series is going to get. I would love to see Team NINJA work with the community in the future to not only benefit Team NINJA's sales, but their own community as well.
