3,000 less people sign up to compete at Evo in 2017, year on year

EVO organiser Joey ‘Mr. Wizard’ Cuellar has revealed the number of entrants at EVO for several different games, revealing that many games have seen huge drops in the amount of registered partipants.

EVO is one of, if not the biggest, fighting game events on the international stage, and so a dip in the number of participants is worrying. It’s not full “the end is nigh” style doomsaying at this stage, but it’s interesting to note that the playerbase seems to be largely split across a few different fighting games, but is down year on year significantly, shown in this pair of tweets below, which shows the numbers but also how they stack up.

With year over year changes pic.twitter.com/xg3tt2S9C3

— Andrew Nestico (@PracticalTAS) July 1, 2017

Street Fighter V seems to have taken the brunt of it, with Street Fighter V’s entrants being around half of as many people entered last year. This comes in a year when Street Fighter has fought its way into the mainstream esports spotlight, and attracted a lot of attention.

The Smash games have both suffered a drop of 1000 or so fighters each, although last year was a record  high for Smash 4 with 2,662 entrants.

There are around 3,000 less players registered to compete at EVO this year, across all games. The dip isn’t necessarily a cause for concern, and could be part of the scenes standard cadence as people float in and out. However, it’s been a good year for the fighting game genre, and it’s a shame to see one of its glittering jewels getting a bit less attention this year.