MY TIME WITH THE FGC ONLINE AND OFFLINE

by Dylan Tierny

I’ve been playing fighting games for over 20 years. Every time I think I’m checked out of the genre, there’s something about them that pulls me back in. Individual games can flounder, patches can disappoint, but there’s nothing like fighting games, and a core part of that identity is the fighting game community. There’s something electrifying about watching people who are really good at what they do go head to head against each other, online in a livestream, or in-person at a major tournament.

“[The FGC] means having a time and place to meet up with friends to play a specific genre of video games that you really love.” says SoulCalibur VI TO and Commentator TiZ. “That’s mainly what it means to me. Friendship in video games.”

The fighting game community, or FGC, can take a lot of different forms and means a lot of things to a lot of people. You and your friends in a Discord call grinding out sets? That’s FGC. You going to Las Vegas to compete with thousands of other people? That’s FGC. You chasing a rank in a game’s ladder…is still FGC. It’s all about the people who are passionate about fighting games, in whatever form that may take Online or offline, and I’ve spent a long time in it..

“[The FGC] encompasses anybody that loves fighting games and plays them, whether that’s casually with their friends, hosting a tournament at their house, going to EVO every year. They play for money, or they make art. Maybe they’re stream monsters. The FGC is really cool because it encompasses people from everywhere.” said Will Borger, Skybox Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Golden Wiiklies, a Discord-based fighting game server.

“It’s a grassroots community where it started because people really liked fighting games. There was no corporate push for this genre for years and years. It was people in the arcades who were like ‘this stuff is sick’. That kind of love spread out.” said Borger.

A lot of my early perception of the fighting game community came with the release of Street Fighter IV – an “’09-er” as folks like me were called pejoratively. Though I was trapped by the whims of absurdly slow, satellite-based internet, it was the first fighting game I remember both playing online, and looking up articles, videos, and forums about fighting game players about. I even went into training mode from time to time!

Suddenly, the floodgates of playing lots of people at any time were open. I really had no idea what in the world I was actually doing. I hadn’t grasped a lot of even beginner-level mechanics, but I did wrap my head around super moves. I was still in my “hey this guy looks cool, let’s see what’s going on” mindset, and this “rule of cool” still dictates some of my modern fighting game tastes.

“This is something I think a lot of people don’t necessarily know, but is actually imperative to the fighting game scene in general.” said DaPurpleSharpie, commentator, interviewer, and event host. “The ‘next generation’ outside of the arcade scene, is the school scene.”

That definitely hit close to home for me. But I had no concept of higher levels of thought in fighting games, or how it’s a vehicle for player expression. That came with meeting other people, and this coincided with me starting college. Meeting other people was one of the most important things to do. The social life I developed tended to revolve around fighting games. This was in a more recreational capacity than competitive, but, a lot of cherished friendships can absolutely be traced back to fighting games. There was a game room that you could rent games for cheap and play on the consoles in the game room, and an entire swath of the room was overtaken by fighting game players of all kinds. People rented games in timed chunks, but as long as you were cool, most people who ran the game room never brought the hammer down on you. It was everything I could ask for.

“You usually get people between the ages of 16 all the way up to, like, 22. Those are college kids. Those are people who inside of their life have usually been around functions that rotate around school.” Sharpie said. Colleges attract talent from across the country and across the globe, and that isn’t limited to academia.

The first game events I went to while still in school were for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. I never topped any brackets, but it was a fun enough reason as any to take a day trip with friends and be completely overwhelmed by the knowledge on display. I was exposed to people playing characters I never thought to play myself, and got to absorb these new ideas in a way I hadn’t before.. Any chance I could find other Yoshi players to learn from, I’d be watching their sets and taking in the match up knowledge. There were names you recognized being in the top spots all the time. Sometimes a top player from out of town would show up and clown on folks. It was fun, plain and simple.

I’m glad I had the competitive stint I did. It really helped put things in perspective. Not everyone gets an organic, local fighting game scene. You definitely get humbled, realizing you were a big fish in a small pond, and you’ll find answers to questions you didn’t even think to ask.

While I didn’t do too much out of state travel, even in my more competitive days, in 2019, I made an exceptionThe Evolution Championship Series. EVO is the largest and most prestigious fighting game tournament out there. For me, who started taking all of this even remotely seriously as I was finding myself in college, it felt like a full-circle moment. I didn’t make it out of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate pools, but I had a lot of fun in the meantime, getting a taste of the larger side of the FGC in-person. It was a lot larger in scope and execution than anything I had been used to in college.

Even with my short-lived tenure as a competitor, as a spectator, I was having a blast. Watching major tournaments online absolutely deserves the ubiquity it has today. But the spectacle of it all was something to behold live and in person. While I was there to compete in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, I was just as invested in Dragon Ball FighterZ which was in its prime that year. The game had been out f long enough for some of the more well-established players to have legitimate storylines you could follow. I’ll never forget the Winners Finals at EVO 2019. SonicFox and GO1 were the two players at Dragon Ball FighterZ’s peak, playfully calling each other out throughout 2018 and 2019.

The “Cell Yell” at the beginning of matches. The shrieks and yelps when block strings went on for over a minute straight. Any time someone did a level 3 the crowd would imitate it fervently, and it was infectious every time. It was an experience I’m still grateful for to this day.

When I graduated college, the cornucopia of fighting game experiences I was freely able to indulge in came to an end. It was up to me to go to locals or brave the online warriors once again, and more to the point it was up to me to cough up for any fighting game I wanted to put serious time into. It wouldn’t be too much longer after that when online play would become priority #1.

COVID-19 fundamentally shifted the priorities of every conceivable level of the fighting game community. Games even slightly before that era had to reckon with a huge swell of online players. It was no longer two separate entities, “offline” and “online”.

“The conversation behind online or offline is such a silly conversation when we’ve already had a historical event that has determined an answer.” Sharpie noted. “There was a literal roundtable with Japanese developers where they all sat there and one of the things that came out of it is ‘we need to work on netcode’”.

Failure to adapt to this claimed plenty of casualties in this new era, including Dragon Ball FighterZ. As much as I loved the game, its delay-based netcode, with its dropped combos and network issues even if you were 20 minutes away from the other player, well-after other fighting games got their act together. Offline events weren’t an option, and everyone in the fighting game business had a much stronger and more vested interest in not just functional online play, but rollback netcode in particular. Suddenly, you had more online communities spring up, and with netcode steadily-improving across the board, you could play with people reliably you just realistically could not before. For DBFZ, rollback netcode 6 years after the game came out was too little, too late at that point.

“[Nowadays], if you live in Nebraska and have an internet connection, you can play, you can find people to play with, you can build a community, and compete without even traveling. You can build the stamina you need [to compete].” said Borger.

The big rollback push brings us into the modern era. Games like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 are tapping into a live service-esque framework. While these games have had issues crop up from overbearing battle passes to questionable balance adjustments, netplay isn’t even in the conversation. It’s just assumed that an upcoming fighting game is going to have rollback netcode, greatly improving the longevity of whatever game adopts it.

”Online play is part of how you get better offline.” said TiZ. In 2025, online and offline spaces in fighting games do more than just coexist. They strengthen each other. The breadth of players you’ll get by being able to reliably play against people across the world is too good to pass up. How you choose to engage with fighting games makes you part of the FGC. I don’t play fighting games as much as I used to, but I can’t see myself ever completely stepping away.