As someone who's been playing fighting games for a long time now, this is true and anyone who thinks they can break through to mainstream adoption is absolutely fucking nuts. You have to be at least a little bit of a masochist to get anywhere in the genre because the time investment to grind through loss after loss after loss in order to scrape you way up to being a mediocre player is demoralizing enough to make the vast majority of people quit. The genre is simply a house of pain and suffering that most people aren't willing to endure. On the other side though, it offers some truly unique experiences in the form of mind reading and the ability to outright crush another person's spirit.