Fighting Games Friday: Sure Seems Like a New Street Fighter Game Is Coming

It’s been nearly four years since Capcom released Street Fighter V for PlayStation 4 and PC. Sales for the base game struggled out the gate when it arrived, a fact well publicized at the time; but the development team’s continued support helped grow and maintain its player base. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Sony Interactive Entertainment footed at least a fair portion of the production budget (which also kept it off Xbox One), and that its DLC is priced higher than Street Fighter IV’s. Despite that, it’s still good that Capcom has continued supporting it for the community’s sake.

The updates came at a steady pace for nearly three years, but noticeably slowed down this year. After Kage released to kick off SFV’s fourth season in December last year, further updates didn’t arrive until Evo 2019 in August — which, in fairness, included three characters. It didn’t receive another significant update until this month with Gill, while nonbinary more-machine-than-human Seth will arrive in February alongside the Champion Edition. Capcom already said it will be another while before the next update arrives, but it didn’t take long for fans to wonder if support could be ending soon.

Capcom sputtered more fuel onto the fire of speculation after providing details for next year’s Capcom Cup final. Unlike most other Capcom Cups, the champion of the Capcom Cup in 2020 won’t qualify for the Capcom Cup in 2021.This is uncommon, but not without precedent. This previously happened with the Capcom Cup champion for Ultra Street Fighter IV in 2015 (Kazunoko), who didn’t qualify for the same position in 2016. That’s because… well, guess what released in 2016? Street Fighter V. You know what this is getting at (especially if you saw the linked tweet well before I got to this post here): A new Street Fighter game might be coming in 2021.

This interestingly runs contrary to what Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono implied in an interview with Eurogamer in early November. “Let the next generation start, let the install base increase, see the capabilities in the wild, and then take a look at how we approach our game design from the bottom up on that new platform,” he told them. Since next-generation platforms, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, aren’t coming until fall 2020, this implied that Capcom wouldn’t even start developing the next installment until they arrived. If that happened a new game wouldn’t come until 2022 at the earliest. Sure, Ono is known for occasionally trolling fans, but this seemed believable given how honest he was about SFV’s early development.

Fans initially didn’t believe him when he said Capcom wouldn’t give them the money for SFV in 2013, but it became clear that he was being truthful when Sony had to provide funding for it. There’s no way Capcom wouldn’t have wanted to maximize their profits and release it as a multiplatform title, unless a hardware manufacturer had to step in and help with its development. The Capcom Cup info above implies a 2021 release for the next game.

If a new SF game happens, what form could it arrive in? Its cast is more likely to resemble SFV’s, and involve the same traditional characters fans know and love, like Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li. The fighting game genre mostly runs on familiarity these days, outside superhero, anime, and adaptations of franchises in other genres like Granblue Fantasy and Persona. I’m not the only one who’d love to see a sort of soft reboot along the lines of Street Fighter III, where most, if not all, of the characters are new. But Ono ruled out the chance of this happening as long as he’s attached to the series. Even if he wasn’t part of a future SF game, Capcom likely wouldn’t green light that kind of project thanks to the SFIII games underperforming.

Capcom might reveal the game soon if it’s actually releasing in 2021, given the time between the reveals and releases of previous games. SFIV was announced in late 2007, released in arcades in summer 2008, and for home consoles in early 2009. SFV was announced in December 2014, and released in February 2016. But they could be trying out a different pattern here, for a shorter gap between the announcement and release, which there’s precedent for outside Capcom fighting games. There wasn’t even a six-month gap between the reveal and release of Mortal Kombat 11, a game that sold more than fine. There wouldn’t be an issue with Capcom repeating that pattern.

This is all assuming there’s actually a new Street Fighter game in development. Let’s hope the Capcom Cup 2020 winner won’t qualify for 2021 because there won’t be a Capcom Cup that year, due to Capcom no longer having a fighting game to support. I hope I didn’t jinx anything

The next Street Fighter title is bound to be a next-generation or cross-generation game, so it could be presented with other titles during the full reveal for both platforms and their software early next year. If not, there could be something at Evo.

P.S. In other fighting game news: Can you believe they’re still releasing characters for Dissidia Final Fantasy NT? I keep reading about how devoid of players the online mode is, but the DLC must be selling fine enough if Square Enix keeps releasing content. The newest one will be Final Fantasy XV villain Ardyn, who will be available on January 9th. It’s possible he may not even be the final character they have in store.