In his EVO 2k10 wrap-up, James Chen has a fair point that Street Fighter IV's popularity can only be a benefit to the fighting game community as a whole. Certainly, unifying fighting games and getting individual communities to support and feed off of one another is an admirable, and generally pretty good, idea. However, I disagree with the analogy that the fighting game community can truly become similar to the poker community.
While there are many, many variations in poker with different applicable strategies during gameplay, each variant uses the same foundations, and picking up one kind of poker once you know another is only a matter of mastering the different nuances that make up the new game. I don't see fighting games as having the same properties. Sure, there are fighting games that are very similar to one another; but there are also fighting games that are as different as night and day (just compare Street Fighter IV to Super Smash Brothers Brawl). Both games allow you to attack your opponent to land damage, but mastering either one of these games does not make it easier to master the other any more than mastering Texas Hold'em helps you to master SSB Brawl.
I don't disagree that the different fighting game communities should embrace each other, but it should be more of a partnership or alliance than a true merging of the communities. Rather than emulating the poker world tournament, the fighting game communities should organize somewhat like the various sports games do during the Olympic Games (EVO 2k already comes pretty close to this philosophy right now). In this way, the smaller communities can benefit from the popularity and exposure gained by the fighting game community as a whole, but they can still remain independent communities devoted to their games of choice.
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