The problem these casual fans are having is that they don't wanna play against people because they take losses far too seriously. Imagine taking the difficulty in Souls too seriously and people crying that there is nothing for them without piss easy mode. SFV will have long legs and that's the model SFV is going for. The people who are pleased with its initial lacklustre sales are just petty and don't want to invest time to play the game.
I love MK but its not a 1:1 comparison with SF. They priorities different things, at least SF lets you earn characters for free and online play isn't region locked. I'm not even going to compare gameplay because it's apples to oranges but I've always preferred how SF plays.
How can you talk about MK not being a 1:1 comparison, whilst attempting to draw parallels with Dark Souls of all things?
There's no similarity at all to Dark Souls. Firstly, yes... Dark Souls
does offer basically nothing to anyone that's not its core audience. It knows this though, and doesn't expect any more than that. Street Fighter V is a different case... it's not as simple as it only catering to those with an interest in fighting games. It's now only catering to a small sub-segment within those that are basically the real life embodiments of Ryu, where the fight is all, and self-improvement is the only motivation that matters. People play Dark Souls not to get beat the shit out of... they play it in order to beat the game, and feel the satisfaction that comes from doing so, much like lesser fighter game players often do when facing the AI and finally getting past Vega or Bison in SF2, Gill in SF3, Seth in SF4, Goenitz (that muthafucka) in KOF96, etc.
In order for someone online to win in Street Fighter, it is REQUIRED that someone else loses. This isn't true in Dark Souls, because the AI is happy to lose for us, so that once any individual person obtains a certain level of ability, they are essentially guaranteed success. In Street Fighter (and any other competitive game), there is no fixed level of "good enough". If every person that ever played it took the advice of posters that said "practice and get good"... then pretty much the exact same pool of people would be losing just as frequently, because the bar would simply raise for everyone. To tie this back to the Souls games, it would be more like if progressing through the game hinged entirely on repeatedly defeating other players rather than AI enemies. In this scenario, most of the playerbase that doesn't sit at the top of the skill tree would become frustrated, and likely drop it because losing constantly sucks, especially if you're losing after 100 hours, because your opponent has been playing for 15 years.
The Dark Souls scenario is far closer to playing Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat vs the AI than it is playing against a constantly improving pool of dedicated players online.
