I have previously come across a lot of comments on how SEGA lies about their sales and how they just plainly lied about VF5FS sales when they remarked they were good.

Now, multiple SEGA guys stated that the downloads exceeded their expectations, but where does this take us ? The game won't be free in a few weeks and it does seem to have a steep price of 29 dollars (if you want everything in), will the downloads after this becomes priced be taken into consideration ?

if i remember correctly, last time I checked Final Showdown on Xbox360 had 40k-50k total players in leaderboard.
I don't know the numbers on PS3 (where it was initially free on Plus as well).
I remember Sega being happy as well, but I always thought the x360 numbers where pretty low, even a total failure compared to vanilla VF5.

When I started matchmaking in Ultimate Showdown the first days, the 10kyu was around 100k.
Unfortunately it's difficult to browse the entire leaderboards (thousand of pages) to see the last numbers.

It's a free game so number are greatly inflated, but for once it's something good for us (more chances for VF6).

I just checked, and the leaderboard count right now on Xbox is exactly a total of 87493.

What? So it received a nice boost, who knows if it's thanks to Xbox One backward compatibility or to Ultimate showdown release...

Yes it's because the backward compatibility of VF5FS.

But SEGA made awful decisions with Virtua Fighter, and still today ...

VF5FS in 2012 should have been ported on PS4/XB1/WiiU/PC since the beginning ! Just like Koei Tecmo did with DOA5LR.

Virtua Fighter since 5 = awful decisions/management and bad marketing.

Same with VF5US, This game should be mutiplatform from the start on PS4/PS5/XB1/XBS/Switch/PC with cross play.

And we are next gen now, of course they have to think about a 4k patch and graphics upgrade soon. Because it almost cost nothing for "SEGA" (big company) to add 4k textures and remove this ugly aliasing.

I think apart VF5 vanilla (being a more of the same made everything easy for Sega), from 5-R to Ultimate it really shows the series desperately needs Yu Suzuki direction, in both game design and global management.

Final Showdown was a bad idea since the beginning, in 2012 the game was already 2 years old (with fans crying for years for VF5 R port...), and they made it digital only with barebone content.
Too little too late, in fact it basically killed the series.

Ultimate Showdown started with the same errors: being digital only, bare bones content, online multiplayer focused (you can't dismiss single player and local multiplayer), exclusive to one platfrom (without even being optimized for PS5 next gen) etc.

It's just like they barely tried, knowing the game was already doomed even before release..
And the problem now (for Sega) is the game instead is success (well kinda, it's always a free game), so they are totally not ready to improve VF5US, let alone make a brand new VF6 that isn't just a more of the same with casual mechanics.

Also Aoki while he seems a nice guy, he really seems to lack ambition.
I don't feel we are in good hands unfortunately.

Well we'll see...

I hope VF will have the same treatment for the West as Yakuza or Judgment, or even Super Monkey Ball recently.

SEGA has no excuse now, because they have seen that a real and huge audience was ready for Virtua Fighter, despite the average VF5US and the terrible release.

And Harada just exposed them, saying if he was a SEGA dude he would start to make a VF6 right now, because of the VF hype and VF5US success !