Ed Boon, the co-creator of the
Mortal Kombat series, has recently stated that the low sales of fighting games might be attributed to the hardcore reputation of the genre. He said that there just isn't a big audience for really complex fighting titles anymore and that developers who want to be successful must take the casual gamer into account during development as well.
In an interview with Gamasutra, he revealed that “When we make Mortal Kombat games, we've always tried to keep them accessible. We really don't want to put something in the game that 80 percent of the public will never experience or never be able to execute. I think that's a recurring thing that we're really trying to keep in mind, is if the average person will be able to enjoy, experience or execute this move.”
He also explained that although fighting game developers struggled to cater to a more casual audience in the recent years, their market perception remained the same. “Unfortunately, I think that some people are associating [with the fighting genre] this kind of complexity that they don't want to learn,” he told Gamasutra. “That makes some developers shy away from [the genre] because it's really such a niche market.”
Despite all of this, he declared that the new
Mortal Kombat game set to appear in 2011 is designed with the hardcore gamer in mind. They are the most vocal community, even if their numbers are much lower than that of the silent casual type. The title will bring the series back to its roots with two-dimensional gameplay, deep fighting mechanics and strategies, the Unreal Engine 3.0 3D graphics notwithstanding. He assured that casuals would be able to enjoy it too, a must in today's market. The title will be launched sometime in March 2011 on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.
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