So what exactly caused this drop? I don't think it's Trump alone, that's a lot of people that dropped off the SFV boat (and other boats). I haven't been keeping up, are people not taking the patches well or what?
I don't really blame EVO if it was trending upwards and then things out of their control reversed that trend after booking these things a year in advance.
Son you had your head stuck in the sand all this time?
Watch any Born Free interviews out there with the pros, they have all been going HAM on Season 2 of SFV.
I think it's a combination of a multiple factors that resulted in this decline:
*SFV caused a lot of people to get hyped and enter in EVO as it was a new game. A lot was riding on it and people tried to ride the hype bandwagon as much as they could. Now that hype bandwagon is gone and people who weren't really competitive in the game don't really want to compete in the game anymore.
*Accommodations and venue were not up to snuff based on people who went there. Lots of cramming in small spaces due to the amount of people. I think for a lot of people it was probably too much for them to come back to.
*People did not like the assigned seating arrangement of Mandalay Bay, they prefer the old style of seating in the older EVOs.
*A lot of major games have their own major tournament circuit now like SFV, Tekken, DOA, Arc games etc. EVO for some games is not the end all be all place to crown the world champion, it is actually just a grand slam as far as they are concerned. For example, people don't consider Infiltration the world champion of SFV, they consider it to be Knuckle Du. EVO still has the prestige but relative to before it means less in the grand scheme of things.
*The eventual decline of fighting games. A lot of the games still on that list are older games now, we got like 2 new games this year. The 2 new games we got this year are not that different from older games, people just aren't hype for the same Tekken 7 that has been at EVO or Injustice 2 which has had wack showings at EVO before (people seem to treat IJ2 the same as IJ1).
*Trickle down effect of SFV not pulling in the numbers. Where there isn't a lot of cross over, there are enough pot monster type people who enter multiple games just for the hell of it. When you lose such a chunk of SFV players, it trickles down and effects every other game as we are seeing.
*This is a huge conjecture on my part... but I think the donation drive hurt the entrant numbers too. I think if Pokken and Marvel 3 were both in then entrants would've been better because Pokken would've pulled some nice numbers overall and it would've trickled out to other games a bit. The whole donation thing just rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, it had the opposite effect that the one with Melee because it did not result in a snowball type momentum for Marvel 3 due to Marvel Infinite taking so much mind share at the same time.
*You also have far more overlap in types of games... you have two Smash games, two Capcom games and two anime games. There is no wild factor game in at EVO like Pokken was last year (which mind you got a thousand entrants in there). The lack of a wild game at EVO means that there is less incentive for the casuals to go to EVO because a new, untested game like that means people think they have a chance to do well (when of course they don't, it's the illusion).
There are probably more factors at play but that's how I see it.