zarmack wrote:Both of these are false claims.
The previous EVO Japan tournament had Smash 4 in its lineup (and Japan has a relatively big competitive Smash community), and DBFZ according to records sold more in Japan than most console fighters this gen, including SF5 and BBTB.
I confused myself as far as the Smash thing goes. There was no Melee at EVO Japan, where it has little to no competition. It's the same reason there was no Marvel Tournament either. Nintendo, or maybe even the organizers themselves, likely don't want them to run the Wii U version. It might even just be too new, even Arms had been out for longer at the time.
As far as DBFZ goes, it is not popular in Japan
competitively, not sales wise, meaning people who are playing it tournaments. SFV is hugely unpopular and sold terribly, but its numbers at EVO 2018 were still quite close to DBFZ (the difference was only around a hundred or so entrants). Not to mention, SFV (along with Tekken 7) also has the advantage of having the pro-game license available for players. In Japan, there are various gambling laws that affect being able to run things like fighting games for money, but thanks to the license SFV is able to run events for much higher prize pools for example.
Maybe publishers have to shell out to get games in tournament and Bandai is more worried about SC6 getting popularity and they aren't worrying about FighterZ which already made back its money. There could be various other reasons as to why FighterZ is not gonna be on the lineup, it still wouldn't make game super popular in its native region.