Street Fighter 5 launched in 2016 in rough shape, and if things hadn’t changed, the classic fighting game franchise might have been dead and buried by 2026. That’s according to Street Fighter 6 producer Shuhei Matsumoto and game director Takayuki Nakayama, who recently spoke about how Capcom’s signature fighting game franchise was knocking on death’s door at one point, before a turnaround strategy reenergized it for a new generation of digital fisticuffs.
Following Capcom veteran Yoshinoro Ono’s exit from the company in 2020, Matsumoto and Nakayama started work on a new Street Fighter game that could appeal to both the existing–and aging–player base while attracting new blood to the series. “When the two of us were talking during Street Fighter 5, we realized that if we didn’t do something about Street Fighter, the Street Fighter IP would probably die in 10 years. It was critical. So, we had to make it a game where people would get to know it all over again and play it again,” Matsumoto said in an interview with Karin Ohira (via IGN). “At that time, the player base for Street Fighter 5 was roughly 35 to 45 years old. In 10 years, these people will be 60. It’s difficult to sustain the franchise if we only rely on that group.”
Matsumoto added that while Street Fighter was still recognizable as a franchise, that didn’t mean people were engaging with it. If things didn’t change, Matsumoto predicted that the IP “would likely die in 10 years.”
The turning point came with Street Fighter 6, as the team approached its development as if it were a brand-new fighting game. By not relying on the legacy of Street Fighter, designing the Modern Control scheme to level the playing field, adding World Tour mode, and incorporating the fighting game community more closely into the project, Street Fighter 6 proved to be a hit when it was released in 2023.
Street Fighter 6 is also arguably the fighting game of the current decade. It still has a healthy audience, has expanded with post-launch content, and its modernized control schemes have attracted new players. It would have been a strange twist of fate if Street Fighter did fade into obscurity, as back in the late-2000s, Street Fighter 4 was credited with reinvigorating the fighting game scene, following several years of the genre being overshadowed by new game IP on the rise.
You could also point to Street Fighter 6 as another example of Capcom’s golden touch: after the release of Resident Evil 7 almost a decade ago, the company has turned out hit after hit, with only a few misses along the way. This year alone has seen Capcom release four games, with each one being critically acclaimed–Resident Evil: Requiem, Pragmata, Monster Hunter Stories 3, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword.
Beyond that, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil movie adaptation has also been a big hit–and is one of the most commercially successful in the franchise–and it’ll be followed by a new live-action Street Fighter movie later this month.
