Capcom’s Street Fighter 6 is an odd case. While released to initial universal praise, even selling 2 million units in under month, an insane rate for a fighting game, soon the cracks began to show as the months waned on to Capcom’s radio silence. For a long time players were unsure if they were going to receive any new content at all besides the corporately sponsored avatar costumes that are near universally unpopular with the playebase. With such drought of content it’s no surprise that the announcement that costume 3 was finally coming to Street Fighter 6 was met with much joy… followed by apprehension at the lack of a price attached to said announcement. And now it looks like that hesitation was well-warranted, as many players are voicing dissatisfaction with Capcom’s predatory monetary system in regards to purchasing costumes.
It’s been number-crunched that all the costumes together cost a whopping $99.98 total, more than even the base game.
While that is a lot of money, most players are likely to only want to buy a costume for the character they play the most, not the entire cast. The unfortunate thing about that is that you can’t just buy costumes with straight up money. You have to go through a monetary middle-man using Street Fighter 6’s in-game Fighter Coin currency the smallest of which, inconveniently, comes out as just enough money to not be able to afford a single costume. Which means you have to buy the second smallest Fighter Coin package at roughly $10 when you only really wanted to spend half of that.
These predatory practices have obviously drawn a lot of ire from the community. The smallest tweeters to even the biggest fighting game community influencers such as Maximilian Dood have been calling Capcom out for their awful monetizations.
It seems like it’s one step forward and two steps back for Capcom in regards to their handling of Street Fighter 6 post-launch. It’s a sad state of affairs that the game came out to such joyous applause but is completely let down by the awful post-launch content. One can only hope that Capcom rectifies their decisions here, but the trust in Capcom’s fighting game division has definitely soured in the past several months.