Fighting game competitors and fans from around the globe are gathering this weekend in Las Vegas for the Evolution Championship Series (more commonly known as Evo), the world's largest fighting game event. We detailed exactly what attending Evo is like back in 2013. This year, the tournament features the following nine games, with the number of player entries noted after each game:
Street Fighter V (5107)
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (782)
Mortal Kombat X (713)
Guilty Gear Xrd: Revelator (910)
Pokkén Tournament (1180)
Killer Instinct (546)
Super Smash Bros. Melee (2372)
Super Smash Bros. for WiiU (2662)
Tekken 7: Fated Retribution (549)
There's something for everyone, from the more casual and accessible games like Smash Bros. and Pokkén Tournament, to the more hardcore stylings of anime fighter Guilty Gear Xrd and arcade-only Tekken 7: Fated Retribution, but Street Fighter V is the big story, with registration more than doubling last year's entries for Street Fighter IV.
That's good news for Capcom, but it's also potentially good news for fans of fighting games in general, because the record-breaking entries have attracted the attention of ESPN, which will be broadcasting the grand finals Sunday evening on ESPN2. This will be the first time a game like Street Fighter has received such mainstream coverage.
Fighting games are a bit of a niche genre. They don't attract the attention and numbers of games like DOTA2 or League of Legends, but they do have the advantage of being much more accessible to the casual viewer, something ESPN is apparently banking on. It's much easier to follow a one-on-one fight, where all the action takes place on a single screen, and the objective of beating your opponent's life bar down is readily apparent.