Fighter Demographics

There tend to be long delays in the SC2 coverage between games at MLG events. It takes a few minutes to set up the next game in a match and between matches it takes even longer to get the casters into the next match. Normally I'd just flip to another SC2 stream but this weekend I've been checking out the fighter games which seem to have absolutely no downtown between games and a low amount between matches. As such I've caught a bit of talking about the fighting communities but not all that much...

One interesting thing I heard was that a bunch of players flew in from Thailand to play in the King of Fighters tournament. The casters mentioned this because no one had any clue what kind of players these guys were because they didn't stream their games on the internet so no one had seen them play. I watched one of these guys lose near the end of the losers bracket which I believe put him 5th place for a $1000 prize. Pretty sweet, but I looked at the price of a flight from Thailand to Columbus and it's a lot closer to 2k than 1k. And I believe the top 4 (which has not yet been played out) are all from the US. But I figured there were still two other fighting games to go so maybe those guys would be able to make more of that money back in those.

I've watched three matches of Soul Calibur today (I used to play a little of previous versions in the arcade so at least I have some understanding about what's going on) and was really surprised by the demographics of the people playing. 5 of those 6 players were African American and the 6th was an Asian woman. I've watched a lot of SC2 events in the last year and I'm struggling to remember ever seeing anyone who wasn't a Caucasian or Asian (mostly Korean) male. There was one Caucasian female in the open bracket of an MLG event last year but she didn't do terribly well. Obviously the Soul Calibur sample size is really small compare to the StarCraft one but it's still really a stark contrast.

Even looking at the crowds for the SC2 event (there don't seem to be anyone watching the fighters at the event) it's overwhelmingly male. It's almost exclusively Caucasian/Asian. 42% of video game players are female so it has to be something about the culture of an event or of SC2 in general that's keeping the women away. I don't have any ideas or answers here. Just sad observations.