I don't think it's that players really, truly "want" games to die. It's that they know the margins are just that thin. If you get 6 people who regularly play Non SF4 Game at your locals, and a couple of them drop out due to work/school/frustration with skill level (theirs or others'), that's a wrap. Especially if one of them is the one always bringing out a setup. You can only watch that happen so many times.
This happened to TN anime recently. We were basically split between 2 main cities being Nashville/City B(don't wanna name too many names :v) with 3 guys from another city that would come down. A couple years ago you'd expect most people from the different towns to show up, we're about an hour and a half apart and it's not too bad.
Then people started getting fed up. The main TO stopped playing fighting games, a player from another city started getting into it, and welp. TO quit, so I started TOing and running stuff and it was okay for a bit, then soon after City B started getting messed up. The main guy running stuff in City B graduated college and started working, and one other dude dropped out of games for personal reasons. All it took for that entire city of players (somewhere around 10 guys maybe) to stop cold turkey.
Between Nashville having 1 figurehead drop and City B dying thanks to 1 or 2 people dropping out, we lost 10+ players which is over half our scene of active players in a couple months. Now it's a small handful of like 5-6 Nashville players(one of which moved from City B) barely scraping by to get stuff to happen.
I'm trying to drum up ranbats for Xrd with the local arcade sponsoring us, he's sponsored us before to try and help out and keep running stuff, but it's still rough.There are still people around Nashville playing and doing things, but travelling died, local tournaments are all a wash, and it's more or less a competitive stand still.
New blood or some other form of competition smashing through the door would be a godsend, but I admit Idk how to find people to get involved like that. The local University has a fighting game club but they never wanna come hang out with the arcade rats :<
Edit: I will elaborate on the huge frustrating side effect of players dropping is the skill gaps and the mind numbing effect of playing the same 1-2 people forever. The skill gap is a huge problem to be honest. Like if you want to get into Persona here, you'll run into me Aigis-ing you into oblivion or the one other good Narukami creaming you, or you will play somebody who doesn't know a combo. Nothing in between. Same thing in BB, only people who will run shit on you, or people who don't do combos or use barrier. UNiEL started out kinda tight and had like 16~ people tournaments for a month or two, but I've won all the ones I've entered with the same 2-3 people right behind me or winning the ones I'm not at. You either fight us, who will kill you off one mistake, or again people who don't know BnBs. There's no middle ground. What sucks about UNiEL is there's one other player who likes to go super hard in that game here, but me and him have played the same 7-3 MU probably 1000 times, so after like 5 games we just look at each other and shrug. We try flipping around games, we try picking new characters, we encourage players to learn more and try to help and do what we can, but that gap basically kills everybody's motivation to play consistently. Nobody likes free wins, nobody likes getting their back blown out.
So like there's that. In SF4 land, there's always a set up, and always a wide range of skill levels to play, so it's easier to accommodate people in a way to have fun. In anime land, the situation I just laid out is actually super common, and without that everyday drive to play and improve, people just stagnate until there's a regional; where all the stagnation meets in one spot and the few people who went hard bump against each other and realize they have shit to work on, but they go back to the stagnant hometown afterwards until it's time again. It's also worth noting in SF4 land, if somebody drops, you probably only have to wait weeks to months for a replacement to pop up. In anime that wait is months to years.
That's what it's like to play non-Capcom games in a lot of regions that didn't get lucky and just have a scene survive through a lot of bullshit.
Was a lot easier to play back then, nothing in SFII comes close to an DP FADC Ultra for example.
Plus at arcades you didn't have peple resort to lame ass shitty practices because they had to look at people in the face afterwards.
Nah, I think it's more about the average player knowing what a foosie is or knowing how to FADC. There was wild ass shit to learn to do or deal with going back to ST, just your average masher didn't know it.
I will not argue that arcades are much nicer these days, I run all the dumbest shit and have only been threatened a couple times. I know of people who took baseball bats upside the head or had weapons drawn on them back then lmao.