Question.
If a game came out that played street fighter style (ie no airdashes, no long combos, ground and neutral focused) what sorts of things would it need to really gather attention?
SF is much lighter on system mechanics than many fighters and its combos are so short. Is it the game or the name? Is it maybe the fighting style vs other fighting style martial arts theme? You can see the mind games goin on out there, but could another SF style title take off? Was Rising Thunder on its way to this before it ended? What sort of tone is needed to project this SF vibe in a successful manner?
Sorry, its late and I'm trying to chase a thought that keeps dancing around in my head but I cant nail it down. SFIV was around forever and SFV is putting up numbers. I know SFV has some bad shit goin down with it and many talk about it being capcom money that draws folks but I see genuine love for the game and its predecessor and its enough to feel that its not something folks will just let go away easily. I'm just trying to catch on to what it is that holds folks to the gameplay of this series so heavily when there are so many other things out there.
I think one of the big reasons SFV is going to stay relevant (at least in the FGC) is that despite all of Capcom's missteps, there just isn't much in the way of traditional fighters (which have an active scene) with an emphasis on simplicity/accessibility.
As you said, other 2D fighters have taken different routes to try and differentiate themselves from the competition, and these routes often (typically?) result in increased complexity. I like a lot of these games because they're mostly designed for me- somebody who already plays fighting games who is already familiar with skills needed to play them 'properly.' Of the currrent 2D fighters with active scenes (maybe best defined as having an active online community?), which are approachable to a genre newcomer?
Also, for better or for worse, many fighting games opt for an art style that emphatically appeals to a niche, which kind of mitigates the risk of the cost of making the game, as at least that niche will purchase the game and you have a small but guaranteed audience. However, this also hinders the possibility of the game expanding beyond that niche because the art style can end up being an immediate turn-off to many people causing them to ignore the game, regardless of how good everything else in the game may or may not be.
(side note: I disagree with Thomasorus's assertion that younger people can't relate to the martial arts and nationality tropes that are the core of SF's design.)
Also, I slightly disagree with your premise that a game has to be grounded to be simple and neutral focused. I mean- something like Smash is gigantic and aerial combat is very important in that series. I think the issue is more that existing air dash games have a million systems and mechanics, and that leads people to closely associate the two things, but I think you could have an air dasher that's significantly simpler that what currently exists, but there just is no air dasher equivalent of SF in terms of an obvious genre entry-point for new people. (and some things, like the emphasis on chain combos over links make the combo element of air dashers potentially easier than an 'accessible' game like SF).
I'd be really interested to see how a 'introductory' air dasher would do. Like if you take Xrds system mechanics and:
-remove Blitz Shield
-remove Instant Block
-remove Negative Penalty
-remove Danger Time
-buff Bursts (increase the hitbox of blue burst so that they can only fail if the opposing player makes a hard read and stops their combo early, which is fine)
-(maybe) auto FD in the air if meter is available and auto FD to prevent chip death
-(maybe) remove instant kills: they have esoteric rules for comboing into them, and they dont matter too often.
-(maybe) standardize wake-up timings: character-specific timings just unnecessarily forces memorization of a bunch of extra stuff. If oki gets too strong, nerf oki tools on a character-by-character basis.
...and then design and balance the game around those things, what would you end up with? (especially if your aimed at character designs with a bit more universal appeal than you often see in the sub genre) ¯\_(ツ
_/¯
I don't know if this post is even all that coherent at this point. So many factors go into whether a fighting game is successful. We think we understand why they are or they aren't, but everybody forms their theories after the fact (myself included), crafting their hypothesis to fit the data. Hindsight bias is strong and it's very easy to think you have the answer. Regarding your original question, I think that some of the big unexplored ways of gathering attention as a new fighting game are things outside of the game itself. Free-to-play on PC from day 1 is the de facto economic model for MOBAs, the largest competitive gaming genre out there, yet basically no fighting game has attempted this (aside from Rising Thunder, which was never out of alpha(?) and was squashed when Radiant got bought out). Eventually, someone will make a fun mechanically sound fighter with excellent netcode and the DOTA 2 economic model and it could easily eclipse everything that exists right now (in terms of popularity/player base).