I see this all the time but it is never elaborated upon. What are the other factors that hurt the sales? Is there any official info on this? At a guess I imagine death of arcades and complexity of systems, but I legitimately am interested to know.
Anecdotally (I know), the view IS that SF3 had a weaker roster that felt alien.
Factors that were more important to SF3's lack of commercial success than the filler characters from SF2:
- Arcades were done for.
- It was only available on Dreamcast, a console that was also done for.
- Consumers were far more interested in polygonal games, even MvC2 had 3D backgrounds (which its far less popular predecessors did not).
- It wasn't released on PS2/Xbox until the SFAC.
- It had a higher barrier to entry than previous SF games.
- Less of a factor, but the first two entries were pretty but very flawed as far as balance, exploits, etc. The series hit its stride w/ 3rd Strike, but by then only the hardcore were around to play it.
"Oh but Alpha 3 / Marvel..."
Yeah, those games were on PSP/PS1/Saturn/Dreamcast/PS2/GBA & PS2/Xbox, respectively. That's where those games took off, especially in the case of MvC2. Anybody with any relevant console had access to those games.
Also, nobody said Street Fighter Alpha had an "alien" cast. You had Ryu/Ken/Sagat/Chun/Bison and then Guy, Charlie, Sodom, Adon, Dan, Rose who were brand new. Apart from Charlie, none of those guys played like characters you knew and loved in SF2.
Now everybody loves Sakura, Rose, Charlie, Makoto, Elena, Dudley, etc. I'm pretty sure those guys are more popular than Thunder Hawk and Dhalsim.
TLDR; Having Vega, Balrog and Blanka would not have changed a thing about SF3's lack of commercial success. It was a victim of the times.
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And that's ignoring the design itself of the characters. I think it is pretty telling that the most popular iteration of the 3 series brought back Chun and had a Guile copycat. 2nd Impact had to add a Zangief-like grappler, as the "face" of the new series fell flat due to his too simple design. Out of the eight original WW, 5 of them having representation, three directly, two in homages, should tell you something. The something is that the design of SF2 is king. And that's ignoring that 2nd impact had to bring back Akuma.
What the...
Remy a Guile copycat?
Hugo a Zangief-like grappler?
Alex fell flat because he was too simple for a franchise whose main characters are dudes in the simplest of karate gis?