Next years Capcom Cup, the tenth of the series, will make history by featuring a whopping $2 million prize pool. A full $1 million will be awarded to its first-place winner with the rest divided amongst other high placements. While this doesn’t quite match the heights of the largest prize pools of gaming history found in events such as The International, an annual DOTA 2 tournament series which just last year had a prize pool of almost $19 million, it is still projected to be the most prize money for a fighting game circuit in history.
Capcom made the announcement at the end of Sunday’s finale of Capcom Cup IX, which was run on Street Fighter V and won by Saul “MenaRD” Leonardo Mena II. The next Capcom Pro Tour will exclusively use the upcoming Street Fighter 6, which is slated to release on June 2, 2023, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. The prize pool for this year’s Capcom Cup was $300,000, which while still offering a nice reward of $120,000 to its winner pales in comparison to what Capcom is putting up in 2024 in order to promote their new title. Street Fighter 6‘s Pro Tour will kick off sometime this summer, and while the dates for its culminating event Capcom Cup X are not yet set, it’s likely it will take place sometime in February 2024, giving competitive players plenty of time to familiarize themselves with the new release.
According to EventHubs, Capcom’s 2023 Pro Tour will also be the first ever to hold online events in addition to offline, presumably to the game’s apparently much-improved netcode. The exact format and structure remains to be seen, but it’s clear that this upcoming circuit will be one of the most exciting to follow in the fighting game community for the year.