There has been much controversy over Street Fighter V (SFV) since it embodies both the good and bad in the public’s eyes. I chose to analyze SFV because it is personally my favorite eSport to watch. It’s not just the competitions that keep me entertained but also the personalities that make up the Fighting Game Community like Mike Ross, Gootecks, Floe, K-Brad, Justin Wong, GamerBee, Tokido, Infiltration, Daigo, and yes, even Marn.

In today’s gaming era, Patches, DLCs, and Expansions are now essential parts of a game’s timeline. From the very beginning of its launch – even from the development stage – DLC are planned in order to breath new content during its lifetime, thus, keeping it fresh, exciting, balanced, and up-to-date. Patches, however, have a notorious reputation among paying customers who perceive them as an avenue for developers to deliver unfinished games and hold back features behind paywalls and micro-transactions – all for the full MSRP.

Can DLC Save SFV?

The Fighting Gaming Community (FGC) opinion on SFV is mixed, and well, the Steam reviews are literally split down the middle at 50% recommended. The launch of the game was a disappointment and became a bit of a laughing stock among gamers. Its reputation has been a marketing nightmare discouraging anyone new to the genre to pick up the game. However, I believe SFV has very solid game mechanics; an opinion shared by even its detractors. The question then stands: Can SFV come back from its horrible start to bring in more players through DLC and patches?

To answer this we look at player counts over time in relation with the four major DLC content released and measure how much they boosted player counts:

Alex (3/28/2016) Guile (4/28/2016) Cinematic + Balrog + Ibuki (6/30/2016) Juri (7/25/2016)

Objective: We want to look at the Causual Impact that each DLC has on Street Fighter V’s (SFV) player count on the Steam platform.

Method: We will form a Bayesian Structural Time Series for the SFV player count over time built with control variables of similar fighting games: Guilty Gear Xrd (GGX) and Mortal Kombat X (MKX). These two titles are played by SFV players as well as across the fighting game community (FGC) without having been affected by the SFV patches. This makes them ideal controls to serve as covariates on player count trends and decay. With these two titles and weekly seasonality modeled, we make a counterfactual prediction on what the player count would have looked like had the patches not been implemented. In essence we predict what the SFV player counts would have looked liked without the DLC and compare it with the actual player counts with the DLC. The difference between this counterfactual prediction and the actual count will make up the effect the DLC had on the player count.

Data: We scraped daily SFV player counts on the PC platform through Steam (the PS4 data was unavailable). This is the number of unique players who has played SFV for any amount of time in any given day. It would have been better to look at new player counts or purchases since we want to measure SFV’s growth, but unfortunately, this data is not available to the public. Therefore, we will go based on how many people play the game.

Predicting Street Fighter Player Counts with Guilty Gear Xrd & Mortal Kombat X Below is a plot of players per day of three similar titles: Street Fighter V (SFV), Guilty Gear Xrd (GGX), and Mortal Kombat X (MKX). We choose GGX and MKX because they are popular among the FGC and is often played alongside SFV. Like any game, the release date has the largest player count followed by a steep decline immediately after launch, and then a slow decay afterwards with the numbers settling around its core players. Of course, new players can purchase the game at anytime but new player data is unavailable so we take all players as is. Both SFV and MKX have similar sizes while GGX has a smaller playerbase. If we scale the player numbers by logging it, we observe that the shape of decay is similar. There are blips in MKX and SFV due to patches and DLC injections at those time, but GGX has had no major patches or characters since launch so it shows a natural decline. It serves as an example of what player counts look like when there is no developer intervention. (A quick shoutout to developers: I’m hoping for a Capcom vs Arc System Works…please, make it happen in my lifetime!) Causal Impact Analysis We will use GGX and MKX to inform the SFV Bayseian Structural Time Series model on how it trends as the game ages. We also account for weekly seasonality since there are more players on the weekends than weekdays. Building the Time Series, we now turn our attention to the first DLC character release, Alex. As shown in the topmost figure there was a bump in players upon his release but we want to quantify this value. We will use Causal Impact analysis to do this. This method is primarily used to measure how much of an impact marketing campaigns have on a metric like clicks on an ad. Similarly, we will use it here to measure how much impact a patch has on player counts. In other words we can predict how many players would have been playing SFV had Alex not been released. The difference between these two gives us the impact Alex had on the player count. Alex Release Released: 3/28/2016 In the plot below, the solid black line is the actual player count while the dotted black line is the predicted player count without Alex’s release, also known as the counterfactual prediction (the blue section is the 95% prediction interval). The top graph is the outright values of player counts, the middle is the difference between the actual and counterfactual, while the bottom shows the cumulative of the differences between the two. The Alex effect seems to have had garnered an additional 14,190 player-days (29% increase) over a course of a few days. However, it is short lived and we see a return to normalcy in just one week. This implies that the inclusion of Alex, though providing a short burst of players, did not have lasting effects. Guile Release Released: 4/28/2016 We repeat the same process with Guile’s release. In general it seems to have had a lesser effect than Alex garnering only 4,542 additional player-days (20% increase) and a shorter lifespan of only half a week. What is different from Alex in this release is that it came with a “Rage Quit” penalty system. The effect of this seems to have caused the playerbase to dip faster than usual. The actual count is shifted lower than the predicted by about 550 less players and is sustained over time after the initial burst. This may indicate that the “Rage Quit” system is working, perhaps, by causing offenders who were penalized to play less. Juri Release Released: 7/25/2016 The next patch after Guile was the “Story Mode + Balrog + Ibuki” DLC. However, for now we will skip that release and jump to Juri. Like the other releases we see a short duration jump of about 4,518 player-days (22% increase) and a return to normalcy. Story Mode + Balrog + Ibuki

Released: 6/30/2016

Finally, the biggest release for SFV came with two new characters, Balrog and Ibuki, and a Cinematic Story mode. This 4-5 hour campaign shows not just the same jump in player count on release, but additionally, we see a shift up in the entire trend. This more than makes up for the deficit that the “Rage Quit” penalty system may have caused. Over 56 days there are 57,340 player-days (minus the Juri patch’s effect). Furthermore, it appears that the effect of the Story Mode patch persists into the future as shown by the cumulative difference continuing to slope up. However, there are other events that coincide with the timeline that may have affected player counts:

Price cut 33% (7/15 – 7/17)

EVO 2016 (7/15 – 7/17)

Price cut 33% (8/18 – 8/21)

The Cinematic Story mode provides 4-5 hours of content which means that some players may not binge it in a single day but rather touch it over a few days, thus causing the same player to show up in multiple days in our data. Furthermore, a proper story mode means that new players who trickle in throughout the lifetime of the game now have an on-boarding starting point. Holding the player’s hand through a plot line exposes the user to not just the game’s mechanics, but character personalities and their context within the Street Fighter world. Unfortunately, there is no data on new player retention between those who go through the story mode versus without to verify its efficacy. Still, it has a definite impact on player counts in the long run. I think “soft” content like the Cinematic Story mode that may not affect the game’s mechanics still hold importance on user retention.

Games like Overwatch has proven that new players make character selections based on a wide variety of reasons. Developers dropping skin, lore, and media foster players’ affinity to specific characters, and thus, to the game. Even outside of physically holding a stick or pad controller, entire communities form around fan artwork, highlight reels, and amateur instructional guides. When a game as difficult as SFV cannot easily smooth the learning curve for new players (other than through sheer practice and git gud), developers, I think, should keep players engaged and tethered to a character through these “softer” means.

The story mode has been relatively well received and has impacted player’s perception of the game as a whole. Shown below is the jump in SFV’s Steam rating right when the Cinematic Story mode is released at the end of June. Also noteworthy, is the dip in ratings after the “Rage Quit” penalty system in the beginning of May. Perhaps these are the salty rage quitters flaming the game in reviews, or maybe the system isn’t working quite that well for the general population.