I honestly don’t care about character viability or the competitive blah blah, never did, I used to but not anymore. 16-18 characters is just nowhere near the sweet spot in my opinion.
I understand what you’re saying, but I largely disagree with it. They put only the basic characters in the base roster, while characters that were in previous games all become DLC. Launched with a terrible base game, and all future content is locked behind seasons, passes, or dlc so you can “support” the developers. Dragon Ball Fighterz, Blazblue Cross Tag Battle, & Street Fighter V are the prime examples. I’m saying that you shouldn’t release game with minimal base content, and then have players constantly pay for future content, which should’ve been in the game in the first place. I didn’t say fighting games shouldn’t get support after release.
You can have every character be unique, every character be relevant, and within a certain margin, viable without spending a decade in development. character matchups in a way that isn’t true in most genres, which naturally takes longer by a multiple of how many characters there are. A much higher degree of care is taken on the individual character vs. If Street Fighter 6 launched that way, the players would not tolerate it. gets away with it because nobody expects or cares that huge portions of the Smash roster aren’t viable and are basically useless. Launching a competitive fighter already having a massive roster is an extremely dangerous idea.
If any modern fighting game got little to no support after release, maybe just one major patch, not one would them would be successful. It isn’t ideal, but the likely alternative is to just not have competitive fighting games. The reason the season structure is what is used, is fighting games need persistent support anyway, so drip feeding content in to fund the ongoing support makes natural sense. The nature of a competitive fighting game requires tweaking over time as very small incremental changes to the number of animation frames of individual moves have massive ramifications for the gameplay.