The fighting game arcade scene is/was quite different than that though. Playing a fighting game with random strangers across the world is great, and playing with friends in your living room is fun, but they're not real. Not in the sense that you can get a true, competitive experience from it yet. Sadly, fighting games require split-second timing, measured in tenths of seconds, which is lost on even the best netcode and most powerful networks.

think of it this way - in street fighter, you might have a tier list of characters from best to worst, and it might be decently well-balanced, in spite of the tricks people are able to learn. But take it online and the list can be totally reversed because certain tricks are hard or impossible to react to due to the few-hundred millisecond differences often present in networks.

Playing with only your buddies offline is also seriously lacking because, although after a long time of playing with them you can get good, but it's nigh-impossible to get great. You need to play against different people, who play different characters in different styles, and you can only get that playing online (with all the flaws I've described) or in an arcade, or arcade-style setting. Like all things, you have to expose yourself to great people outside your circle to really understand what it means to be great.

For most games I don't disagree with you, because the internet and home consoles have provided great convenience for players. But the death of the arcade scene for fighting games in America has been a tragedy, when you consider how many fighting games came out all of a sudden since 2008 - Street Fighter 4, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Tekken 6, and plenty of others. The competitive scene in the US is becoming stagnant, because only the old-timers, the ones forged by the fire and sweat of the arcade have remained at the top, while the average gamer has no hope of becoming a "great" fighting game player. I consider it a serious loss for the gaming community.

It's not what you were thinking, I'm sure, but I felt like the comments on this post were really down on arcades, and I wanted to give another perspective.