[quote name='kristianator']part of it's gotta be the culture. back in the day, everyone played fighting games. it was the hot shit, it pretty much had most of the media coverage, people you knew who you didn't think even played video games knew street fighter.. it's just different now. and it's hard to explain it. everything else is clear cut (desire for lower costs and more availability of comp), but i don't really know what happened with the culture. less players, less media coverage, less games being made. were fighting games just a fad? did the decent-to-shitty players just give up on the grind? do new players really dislike fighting games that much because they lack a rewarding single player experience? maybe fighting games aren't pretty enough. it seems like the prettiest ones seem to be the most popular with casual fighting gamers.
i think that if fighting game scene didn't have the drop-off that it did in the late 90's, arcades would probably be more prominent than they are now, even with online console gaming available.[/quote]
if anything, games are more complicated. and there are more of them.
sf2 was pretty easy and had a good learning curve. 3 kicks, 3 punches, a couple special moves. you could be crap skill level and still have things to strive for or find people to compete with. everything was fairly easy to learn just by watching, but hard to master.
on the other hand, sfa2 had custom combos, supers, escape rolls, there might've been a chain combo somewhere. people had enough trouble doing regular moves, and now you got SUPER moves? dang. when you went to the arcade, you got beat bad and you had no idea where to even start.
nowadays, we have GG with 2 different bursts, a guard break meter, IKs, dust combos, certain moves with an EX version, RC, FRC, air recovery, the green block, the yellow block, some characters have parries, dashes, air dashes... and i didn't even mention how complicated the characters are. how's a new guy supposed to watch a match and understand what's going on? and oh yeah, because the arcades don't make enough money, they can't market themselves or always have working parts.
FG coverage probably dropped because it was too complicated for them to actually come up with decent strategies. Gamepro's MvC2 combos didn't even work, with things like (C.HP, wait for opponent to come down, super).
ddr and associated rhythm games led a tiny resurgence of arcades, but only for a little while. you could charge a decent amount of money. the graphics were kinda ugly. it was extremely simple to understand and learn. that's what FGs need. and money, so that they can actually afford to make their place look nice.