Capcom celebrates 8th anniversary of Street Fighter 5 with an apology

Capcom has shared a post to celebrate the eighth anniversary of Street Fighter 5, where it apologised for the game’s original state at launch.

“From the beginning to the middle of the release, there were network issues, lack of content, etc… We are truly sorry for the content that did not meet the expectations of many of you,” Capcom’s Japanese Street Fighter social media account shared over the weekend.

This is something we touched on in our own Street Fighter 5 review from 2016. As we said at the time: “Street Fighter 5’s brilliant combat is let down by a barebones launch and server troubles.”

Thankfully, things eventually picked up. Indeed, Capcom’s message states that the Street Fighter 5 development team “did a lot of self-reflection and worked hard to resolve the issues as much as possible” between the middle and the end of the game’s development lifecycle.

This led to a positive uptick in players from Street Fighter 5’s fourth season onwards, the account notes. Today, “hundreds of thousands of people” are still playing. “I’m very happy about this too,” Capcom said.

Capcom went on to note that it had used this experience to ensure future releases did not fall foul of the same problems. When Street Fighter 6 released last year, we awarded it four stars.

“Street Fighter 6 rights the wrongs of its predecessor while dragging the famous fighting game franchise kicking and screaming into the modern era,” Wesley Yin-Poole wrote in Eurogamer’s Street Fighter 6 review. “Street Fighter 6 is as good a Street Fighter game as I could hope for… It is welcoming, accessible and progressive. It is social, silly and spectacular. And it is very special indeed.”

As for the series’ future, beefy boxer Ed is set to join the Street Fighter 6 roster later this month, on 27th February.