Things are not well in the land of Street Fighter. After an amazing launch in June of last year, with an astounding 2 million copies sold after just month and counting, amazing numbers for a fighting game, it seems that the hype train for Capcom’s legacy fighter seems to be slowing down. Just yesterday the official Street Fighter 6 Twitter account revealed the first fighter pass for 2024, featuring even more customizable Avatar content, to an unsurprising reception of almost unanimous dislike.
To say the developers of the game are out of touch with the crowd they’ve courted would be an understatement, as many of the players who currently make up the playerbase either don’t care for the Avatar system at all, or just barely use it and would probably never spend money on it at all. It’s a problem that has permeated Street Fighter 6’s content release schedule, and problem we’ve even covered before.
Many players were expecting the next character in the promised DLC lineup, Ed, to be featured in this fighter pass and possibly to be released by the end of the month. Unfortunately, Capcom have been radio silent for months on the status of Ed or Akuma, and there hasn’t been a trailer or even a hint for Ed despite the advertisement stating that he’s due by Winter 2024, the end of which is approaching shortly.
Many people are speculating that Ed will be released at the end of February to coincide with Capcom Cup which, as AKI was released in September of last year, would mark 5 months without a new DLC character, and the Capcom Cup of this year’s relationship to the DLC is a rocky road and a bag of trouble in its own right as well. This content drought is definitely not appreciated, and many people joke that Capcom just forgot about Ed entirely.
It was funny before but I’m starting to feel bad Capcom please post about Ed
— shuckle (@ssshuckle) January 5, 2024
The content drought, as well as a bevy of other problems such as the problematic monetization, gameplay gripes, radio silence, and lack of meaningful news spells a world of hurt for Street Fighter 6, as some of its biggest competition in Tekken 8 is just on the horizon, scheduled to release at the end of this month. Not to mention Street Fighter faces some shared spotlight in the 2D realm as well, with Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising taking a good amount of attention from the Capcom faithful, the Guilty Gear series has grown much more popular in the past few years, and Mortal Kombat 1 is there too. If Capcom isn’t careful with their plans for the future of the game then Street Fighter 6 will go the way of Street Fighter 5, that is to say, it’ll be a very distant fourth place in the world of fighting games for its era and an entry that many people don’t recall too fondly.