We are being told a reassuring story right now. The story goes like this: fighting games and complex titles are becoming more accessible. Their tutorials and onboarding systems are improving. Therefore, niche genres will naturally broaden their appeal. Everyone wins.
It's a pleasant narrative. It's also incomplete in ways that deserve scrutiny.
Yes, elegant tutorial design matters. When a game like Marvel Tōkon demonstrates how combo trials can teach mechanics effectively, that's genuinely valuable. When Mortal Shell 2 respects players' time by not burying its systems under needless friction, that merits recognition. These are real improvements to how games communicate with players.
But we are now watching the gaming press and industry discourse treat tutorial excellence as though it solves the fundamental problem facing niche genres: that most people simply don't want what they're selling.
Let me be direct. A fighting game with a perfect tutorial is still a fighting game. It still demands frame-data literacy, muscle memory cultivation, and acceptance that you will lose repeatedly to someone better than you. A complex action title with generous onboarding is still structurally demanding. These friction points aren't purely design failures waiting to be ironed out. They are, often intentionally, part of what defines the experience.
The accessibility-through-tutorials narrative flattens an uncomfortable truth: you cannot tutorial your way around audience preference.
Consider the broader pattern. Marvel Tōkon neared 500,000 sales in its first week, which was noted as impressive for a fighting game. That's actually worth examining. Impressive compared to what baseline? It's strong for fighting games specifically because the genre has a persistently small core audience. That's not a secret or a shame. It's context. No tutorial, no matter how elegant, retroactively expands an entire market segment from niche to mainstream.
The gaming press, reasonably, gets excited when execution improves. When Kotaku and other outlets praise smart onboarding systems, they're identifying real craft. That's legitimate analysis. But there's a slippage happening in the broader conversation, where "this game teaches itself well" becomes "this game has solved its audience problem."
These are not the same thing.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma reportedly wants to balance horror and humor, splatter and cake, death and comedy. That's a design choice. A good pitch, maybe. But no amount of tutorial clarity fixes whether an audience actually wants that tonal mixture. The design challenge and the market challenge are separate problems.
This matters because the industry is increasingly betting on elegant systems design as the solution to genre stagnation. And yes, bad tutorial design can definitely cap a game's potential audience. But we're conflating "removing barriers" with "expanding markets." They don't always correlate.
A perfectly onboarded niche title remains a niche title. It just becomes a niche title that plays better for the people already interested in that niche.
That's not nothing. It's genuinely good game design. But it's not the narrative of inevitable broadening that's being sold. It's not the story where fighting games finally break through because their tutorials got smart.
The honest version of this story is less comforting: some genres have devoted audiences, some improvements in accessibility are real and welcome, and the overall market structure doesn't fundamentally shift because we made tutorials prettier.
We should celebrate better onboarding. We should also stop pretending it rewrites the rules of how audiences choose what they play.