Seems the first Street Fighter game with rollback netcode was in 2008, another in 2011.[1] But perhaps the implementation was poor? I'm not a fighting game expert.
These were rereleases of fairly old games (i.e. niche titles, where most of the people were just playing on emulators). It's also not enough to have rollback netcode, it still needs to be implemented properly, the game needs to have good matchmaking, etc. These weren't new, mainstream releases.
This is why I feel fighting games pretty much left the western scene. It's a very stringent fanbase but not necessarily one that will pay more than some shooter game.
Which is ironic given that Asian games have the biggest whales, but Asia was always 2 steps ahead with lootboxes. The skins in SF6 look great, but they are definitely banking on the fact that <5% of the active players will even consider buying them.
Yeah that's fair. I've been playing some GG Strive recently and compared to how it used to be playing fighting games online, 50/50 you're either against a pleb or Leffen, it's been nice to have somewhat consistent matchmaking in terms of skill. It does fuck it up from time to time though.
