With the success seen by Street Fighter 6, it would be easy to forget that Street Fighter 5 was incredibly unpopular right from the day of its launch. The franchise would thankfully recover following the departure of Yoshinori Ono, who previously headed up the franchise. The combination of Shuhei Matsumoto stepping in as producer and working with director Takayuki Nakayama would eventually lead to Street Fighter 5’s final years being more positively received.
Speaking to Karin Ohira (via IGN), Matsumoto discussed how he was able to save the franchise alongside Nakayama, leading to the incredibly successful launch of Street Fighter 6, which continues to see positive player reception even today. At the time, however, Matsumoto believed that the franchise would essentially die if something weren’t done.
“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.”
This also comes down to the fact that the player base for Street Fighter 5 was getting older, and in ten years, the same players wouldn’t be around to play the game anymore. The title not being able to bring in a younger audience was a big issue for Capcom.
“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.”
“…It had become a distant presence. People knew of the scene, but weren’t actually playing the game, which made us think, ‘This is bad.’ In the end, we’re a game company, yet people weren’t playing our game. Isn’t that the most fatal thing? So that was the biggest danger. We didn’t know if those people would continue with the same level of passion, and naturally, there’s a lifespan to things, right? That’s when we talked about how, if we left it as it was, the IP would likely die in 10 years.”
Moving on to Street Fighter 6, Matsumoto decided to stop relying on the franchise’s legacy to attract an audience. Rather, the team decided to start afresh, and Matsumoto said that Capcom even went as far as to assume that the current generation of gamers weren’t aware of Street Fighter at all.
“While people say Street Fighter has high name recognition, we shouldn’t be overconfident. We decided to act as if the current generation doesn’t know us. We have to properly explain things to those who are just starting to play games now — like who these characters are and how to play — so we don’t take that familiarity for granted.”
Further refinements would be made to the fighting game over the course of development, with Matsumoto pointing to things like the modern control scheme, as well as the fleshed-out World Tour mode, which helped attract a larger audience to Street Fighter 6.
Street Fighter 6 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2. For more details, check out the upcoming roster addition: Arjun.
