How Much of a Playerbase is Competitive?

September 12, 2026 - Published

As a long-time competitive player of multiple fighting games (and even other genres), I've had a lot of conversations with similar-minded people from a game design standpoint. Something I've had to emphasize many times over is that the competitive playerbase of any given game is FAR smaller than most people think (my personal guess was always around 1%), but I've never had the numbers to back it up. This is of course in contrast to the casual playerbase, which most people understand is generally the majority.

Please take this article with a grain of salt -- I don't have a background in statistics, and this is absolutely a back-of-the-envelope calculation. 

Total Playerbase

The game I'll be using as an example is Tekken 8. This may not be the best example, but it's one I have a lot of familiarity with, and it actually has public statistics for what I'm looking for.

Tekken 8 is interesting for a few reasons. For one, it's a fighting game, meaning that its competitive playerbase is definitely bigger than the average game. Even for a fighting game, it has a status for being notoriously difficult -- I'll often shock people by telling them that the average character (in this 40+ character game) has ~100 different attacks each that ideally have to be memorized as both an attack and a defender.

In 2025, Tekken 8 reached 3 million sales. There are certainly more sales by now (2026) and certainly many players that stopped playing the game, but this will be our base number: Tekken 8 has had about 3 million players in its lifetime.

Number of Competitive Players

What defines a competitive player? For me, the base requirement is having played at least a single ranked match. There are definitely players that are playing competitively offline, but there's no way for me to judge whether or not they're playing competitively, nor count them. There are also definitely players who tried out ranked out of curiosity and gave up without wanting to play the game competitively, so this number could be too high or too low.

I'm assuming that it applies to every season (players are simply deranked rather than taken off the leaderboard between seasons), but ewgf.gg has statistics for every single ranked player in Tekken 8. I don't see a total number, but we can extrapolate.

At the time of writing, there are 1,089 players in Beginner which account for 1.20% of the ranked playerbase. Divide 1,089 by 1.20%, and you get the total number of ranked players in Tekken 8: 90,750. Let's round that up to 100,000 for math's sake.

Percentage of Competitive Playerbase

So, in summary, there are roughly 3 million people who have bought Tekken 8. Out of those 3 million players, roughly 100,000 have a rank after almost 3 years. 

100,000 / 3,000,000 = 3.33%

That means that the total percentage of Tekken 8's playerbase is about 3%.

...

Alright, let's talk about this.

What this means for game design

One of my friend group's favorite talking points is: "Why do platform fighters keep failing?" 

Super Smash Bros. is an incredibly popular franchise, so indie games based on it should also be able to attract a large portion of the playerbase. However, most of these are either hilariously obscure or have failed in a spectacular manner.

Icons, Rushdown Revolt, Brawlout, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, Fraymakers, MultiVersus, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Slap City. How many of these have you heard of? How many of these have you played? It might sound like I'm choosing random ones on purpose, but these are some of the biggest platform fighters with loads of positive reviews. Literally the only "successful" non-Smash platform fighters I can think of are Brawhalla and Rivals of Aether, and even Rivals is relatively niche.

My personal guess is that these games rely too heavily on appealing to a competitive audience. On paper, this is a perfectly fine niche to try to take as an indie company trying to separate yourself from Smash. However, think about the 3%.

Smash Ultimate sold over 37 million copies. If you could hypothetically advertise to every single one of those people for your platform fighter, imagine cutting it down to just 3% of the audience BEFORE trying to convince them to buy your game. And the percentage is probably smaller because Smash has a much bigger casual audience!

However, Icons based characters solely off competitive Melee, Rushdown Revolt has crazy fighting game mechanics, Brawlout has meter, NASB has wavedashing, etc. These are all features designed specifically to pull in a competitive audience. Catering to a competitive audience is fine, but if someone asks "Why play Rushdown Revolt?" and the only answer is "The sick competitive gameplay!" then you are automatically playing with 3% of your audience.

I love competitive games, and there's always a place for them in indie game spaces. However, if you're a developer who wants to get your game out to a large audience, then I highly recommend going out and having a better understanding of what makes games appealing to casual players.

I know saying stuff like this is easier said than done, but to be frank, I think that would have helped games like 2XKO a lot.

• Vecderg