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In the recently concluded Saudi E-sports World Cup, a 35-year-old Chinese player named Xiao Hai defeated a group of strong players and became the champion of Street Fighter 6, which caused a huge response on the Internet. Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 were the only two fighting games selected for this international competition.

As one of the earliest e-sports projects, fighting games involve many projects, and the influence of Street Fighter 6 is undoubted. However, the fighting game IP with the best global sales data is not Street Fighter but the Mortal Kombat series.

Making a fortune in silence, the official of "Mortal Kombat 1" recently announced that the global sales of this game have exceeded 4 million copies since its release in September last year.

Strictly speaking, "Mortal Kombat 1" is actually the 12th work in the series. However, due to the reboot of the series, the development company reset this work as "Mortal Kombat 1". In the sales of fighting game IPs in 2023, the "Mortal Kombat" series also ranked first with a total sales of 80 million copies, surpassing "Nintendo All-Star Smash" and "Tekken".

So how did the Mortal Kombat series become the best-selling fighting game series?

"Mortal Kombat", which was released in 1992, is one of the oldest fighting games. However, unlike other fighting games of the same era, in the era of arcade games full of mosaics and pixels, the developer Midway decided to bring something different to players.

At that time, the characters in the games "The King of Fighters" and "Street Fighter" were basically cartoon and anime styles, and the attack effects also had many special effects.

However, Mortal Kombat is more realistic. In addition to the smooth fighting martial arts movements created by real-life motion capture, the violent and exciting finishing moves also separate it from other fighting games. In addition, Mortal Kombat has a lower overall difficulty, which is easy for new players to get started; and a richer selection of characters have attracted a large number of fans.

Entering a new era, the character modeling of the "Mortal Kombat" series has become better and better, and the finishing moves have become more creative. On this basis, the game also introduced a setting similar to a parallel world. In this way, the linkage of various characters in "Mortal Kombat" will not make people feel out of place.

Therefore, in addition to classic characters from the game such as Kung Lao, Liu Kang, and Sub-Zero, you can also see movie characters such as the Joker and the Terminator. The two anti-hero characters Homelander and Omni-Man were added to the game in June this year. It is not just a fight between players who choose their characters, the introduction of the assist system can even allow multiple characters to appear on the screen.

Collaboration is a way to increase the popularity of games, and even Capcom is no exception. Previously, Street Fighter 6 had collaborated with the anime "Spy Play" to create a scene of Chun-Li fighting Mrs. Joel. But Joel is actually just a skin for the original character Julie. Compared with "Mortal Kombat", which designed a completely new character, it still lacks sincerity.

Of course, the two games have different focuses and are not comparable in terms of role interaction. What I want to say here is that the "Mortal Kombat" series is more focused on providing emotional value to players. On the basis of maintaining its original style, it adds more things that people like to see, such as various "Guan Gong vs. Qin Qiong" scenes.

At the same time, players are also willing to give feedback. At the EVO2024 competition this year, Mortal Kombat 1 player SONICFOX imitated the classic scene of the Homelander drinking milk... This is another form of two-way communication.

Among the fighting game IPs, Mortal Kombat is unique and impressive. It is both competitive and entertaining, and I believe this IP will continue to develop in the future.

I wonder what everyone thinks of the "Mortal Kombat" series?