« Gamasutra's Editorial On Street Fighter X Tekken's Underwhelming Sales »

Capcom's Street Fighter X Tekken didn't meet its sales expectations since its launch. Various fans have contributed multiple reasons to why it didn't pass including oversaturation of fighting games and the on-disc additional characters to be unlocked with paid downloadable keys.

Gaming industry site Gamasutra took a look at the situation and broke down various aspects related to the game to help  make an opinion piece by writer Christian Nutt. The full article is available here while you can check out an excerpt of the piece after the jump.

Special: The competition is to blame -- Street Fighter X Tekken didn’t have a chance.

Counter: Capcom, perhaps more any other publisher in the industry, is notorious for milking its games with add-ons, ports, remakes, and new versions.

Sometimes that backfires. Hell, it has backfired in this very market. Before the company released Street Fighter IV and brought 2D fighting games back into the mainstream, it took the genre through its first boom and bust, back in the 1990s. Excess inventory of Super Street Fighter II cartridges for SNES and Genesis reportedly badly hurt the company as it transitioned to the PlayStation and Saturn.

You’d think Capcom would learn.

Still and all, Street Fighter X Tekken came out less than four months after Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and less than three after Capcom launched UMVC3’s Heroes and Heralds mode -- a major content update designed to keep players focused on that title post-launch.

Let’s not forget that all of the fighters the company released this generation feature Street Fighter characters. This was far from true of the Capcom’s output during its most prolific period. How many Ryus do you really need? This is the company’s fifth Street Fighter-based retail SKU since 2009.

It’s true that Namco released Tekken Hybrid late last year. But the truth is, nobody really cared about Tekken Hybrid (it’s an obscure fan-oriented title) and it didn’t even ship on Xbox 360. The decks were effectively clear. Sure, when it comes to casual fans, Tekken is not the draw Marvel is -- an IP that thrives even outside games. But it’s still one of the best-respected and most popular series in fighters.

Then there are the real competitors. Yes, other companies released games around the same time, such as Skullgirls and Soulcalibur V, neither of which sold nearly as well as Street Fighter X Tekken. More relevantly, any student of capitalism tells you you weather competition by having a superior product; whether or not you like Street Fighter X Tekken -- and many seem to -- it’s clear that the game got the least attention of Capcom’s recent fighters. This is thanks to the way the company primed people to actively not want to buy the game -- as we’ll see.

The open question is whether Capcom saw Street Fighter X Tekken and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom catering to different audiences. If so, it might have lost perspective on its own products.