Guilty Gear Producers Shocked At Success — 2.5 Million Players

Fresh off breaking a franchise record for EVO registrations, Guilty Gear Strive is flying high in this now second renaissance for fighting games. We got a chance to sit down with some of the development team at Arc System Works to chat about how they are dealing with the sudden growth from its humble origins..

“We’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of Guilty Gear, and back then you could only find it in niche communities of Japan’s arcades.” says Strive’s director, Akira Katano. “We’re really proud of how far Guilty Gear has come.”

The sentiment is shared by millions of players around the world. Its previous installment, Xrd Revelator, barely crested 700 entries to Strive being the top game at EVO last year above even Tekken 7 and Street Fighter V. And this year, they broke their own record again with nearly 2,500 entries at EVO for the game.

“We’ve hit 2.5 million players..” says Strive’s producer, Ken Miyauchi. “We are kind of surprised at how those numbers have been increasing, and we were actually totally unprepared from a development perspective, so we're trying to scale our company up to support all that community right now.

Strive had the benefit of being released in a somewhat dead patch for the FGC in 2021. Street Fighter 6 was still nearly two years away, Tekken 8 and MK1 hadn’t even been announced yet and Dragonball Fighterz was losing steam. But even with that said, the momentum has carried over into our post-pandemic world. One such reason is that Strive has made..strides…into making the gameplay more enjoyable for new players, a trend that we saw continue with games like Street Fighter 6.

“When you’re watching a fighting game and two characters are just sitting in the corner, it gets kind of boring.” says Katano. “So we wanted to add that to create a more dynamic experience for the viewer. But we still included things like meter gain for breaking the wall, so there’s still an advantage for the player.”

When asked about the future of the game. Miyauchi said that they would continue to approach DLC with balance. Previously, they juggled adding in new, debut characters and old favorites. He says that this will continue but that he could not provide much more information because the community will “get too many hints”. But that’s a fantastic problem to have for Arc System Works, as they look towards their Season 3 DLC for Strive and beyond.