Three hundred and thirteen people. That’s how many were playing Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves on Steam at the time of this writing — a game that won Best Fighting Game at The Game Awards 2025, holds a Metacritic score of 80, and carries a “Very Positive” rating from 1,648 user reviews.

Something doesn’t add up, and the fighting game community knows it. One Steam reviewer put it plainly: “When the best game has the least amount of players, you know the genre is dead.”

SNK’s long-awaited sequel — the first new Fatal Fury in over 25 years — earned serious praise. IGN gave it an 8/10. Eurogamer handed it 4 out of 5. Critics lauded the REV System’s meter management, the honest neutral game with no universal skip-pressure mechanics, and the mechanically diverse 17-character roster. By any critical measure, City of the Wolves is a success.

Then you look at the player count. 313 concurrent. At $19.99, it’s not even expensive.

The disconnect isn’t unique to Fatal Fury. Fighting games on PC routinely earn critical acclaim and community goodwill while struggling to maintain player populations that justify continued investment. The genre demands a commitment most players aren’t willing to make — as veteran fighting game writer Patrick Miller has argued, the hobby has peaks early and late, with a wall-punching valley in between that most dabblers never survive.

City of the Wolves compounded its challenges with odd creative choices. Guest fighters Cristiano Ronaldo and DJ Salvatore Ganacci — additions widely attributed to SNK’s ownership by Saudi Arabia’s Misk Foundation — feel out of place. Ronaldo doesn’t even appear in the game’s single-player modes, according to IGN’s review. A DLC season two trailer in January drew criticism for its use of generative AI.

The competition is fierce. Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and the ongoing live-service arms race leave little room for a legacy brand trying to reestablish itself after a quarter-century hiatus. Physical sales in Japan totaled fewer than 9,000 units across both PlayStation platforms in the first two weeks, according to data cited by Wikipedia.

Reviewers liked the game. Reviewers aren’t enough.

Sources