> developed for games that didn't even have online play at all This is the kicker. The novelty of having any online play is enough to satisfy most hardcore fan

> developed for games that didn't even have online play at all This is the kicker. The novelty of having any online play is enough to satisfy most hardcore fans of a game that would otherwise be dead. Melee fans may rant and rave about Slippy, and rightfully so, but they still don't enjoy finding out their inputs were eaten because they got shined ten frames ago. And the fact is, rollback netcode really is dramatically better than delay-based netcode for making precise muscle-memory inputs, and for most fighting games the precision required for inputs is one of the largest contributors to the skill ceiling, so hardcore fans will be happy compared to the alternative. But let's not overlook the fundamental tradeoffs: with delay-based netcode, you will always be able to react to everything that you are intended to be able to react to; with rollback, you will not always be able to react to everything that you are intended to be able to react to. Even if it's a good tradeoff, it's an inferior experience to playing locally... which is fine, because the convenience of playing online is already a tradeoff that plenty of people are willing to make. But if you design your game from the ground up to improve the experience of online play by smoothing out the reaction curve, that will probably come at the expense of offline play in some capacity. Devs don't want to balance a game twice.