So I've been crunching some video game statistics and making some assumptions, which I thought were interesting to share. My numbers come from here:
http://www.vgchartz.com/In 2011:MvC3 sold about 1.3 Million copies world wide
Mortal Kombat sold about 2.3 million copies world wide
Pokemeon Black/White sold about 7.3 million
Battlefield 3 solf about 5.9 million
Wii Fit Plus 2.7 million
Vanilla Street Fighter IV sold about 2.8 million in it's lifetime
I think we can say that Street Fighter is the most accessible of the fighting game genre so 2.8 million is a preety good number for the amount of fight game players. If you consider that some players buy both X360 and PS3 versions, and some players never buy the game but only play it at their firends houses then perhaps those wash each other out so we'll stick with 2.8 million games. For discussion let's just round that up to an even 3 milllion.
People playing fighting games = 3 million
The top selling videogame for the year is pokemon which is popular amongst a large age range, from children to adults who grew up with pokemon. Don't let the 7.3 million sales number fool you though. That number includes both white and black, which you need to buy both if you intend on "catching them all". So this is not a reliable number to determine the population of video gamers.
Well how big is the entire video game market? Well I'm going to make 2 broad assumptions, first, people who play Battle Field 3 on the XBox or PS3 don't play Wii Fit Plus, so we can assume that these two games represent the extreems of the "traditional gamer" and the "cassual gamer". The second assumption is that about 15% of Battle Field 3 players bought it on two platforms, this will knock off about half a million from our Battlefield 3 number. Since there are also a minimal amount of people who play BattleField 3 and Wii Fit Plus we'll asume they are part of this half a million we're knocking off. So...
+ Battle Field 3 players 5.9 Million
+ Wii Fit Plus players 2.7 million
-
Minus .5 million8.1 million people playing video games (round it to an easy 8 million)
So only about 37% of the video game population plays fighting games. This makes it a difficult market to sell to. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is apparently a niche of this market, as only 43 % of fighting gamers play MvC3. Lastly, IMT has about 30 thousand registered users. This is 1% of the fighting game population.
Mugen, we are the 1%.