I’ve argued (and still do) that Street Fighter 6 is, even in its initial vanilla form, the most balanced Street Fighter entry to date, but balance doesn’t necessarily translate to fun. I wouldn’t go as far as to say the game isn’t fun or engaging, either, but it seems we’re increasingly seeing discussions surrounding the game become more negative here in the game’s fourth month on shelves.
On our latest episode of Talk and Block, Catalyst and I dig into what we’re seeing and hearing as it really does appear as though the Street Fighter 6 honeymoon is over. With that in mind, developers will need to be especially strategic when they eventually do make larger changes to the game.
While complaints about the top tiers and input issues are becoming more prevalent, people are still happily booting up Street Fighter 6 in droves. The good news is that, while it may not quite have the charisma it did upon launch, the game has plenty of charisma in its reserves.
As Catalyst remarks during out discussion, people were very much happy to simply be able to move on from Street Fighter 5, and so SF6 had a lot of initial love simply for being the next thing to move on to from a game that was relatively polarizing.
Capcom clearly made massive improvements on the issues that plagued SF5, making sure to launch its successor as a fully complete title with tons of added bells and whistles that showed just how much they were listening to fans.
A quarter of a year is a long while in video game world, and one would all but expect that fans would begin to lose a bit of interest around this point in time, especially with competition like Mortal Kombat 1 popping up. Conversations about the less flattering aspects of SF6 are actually good, in a way, because they’ve become a very necessary part of the patch/update process.
Looking to the future, we know that Capcom plans to give SF6 a major update once every year, and while we still have a good eight months before it celebrates its first anniversary, the potential for fixes is at an all time high.
Competitive legend BST|Daigo Umehara and biggest name on the Tekken development team, Katushiro Harada, both recently discussed the evolved nature of the relationship between fighting game developers and fans. These discussions weren’t intertwined and came from vastly different points of view, but illuminate where this important relationship stands as of 2023.
While it used to be that fighting game developers would make changes to their games (recall the many updates and version Street Fighter 2 went through) communication with their player base was massively limited compared to modern times. It wasn’t really until the Street Fighter 4 era (some 13 years ago now) that the internet began revealing more specifically what fans wanted.
This is, of course, a double edged sword as many who are vocal are not all that thoughtful, but now information can spread so quickly and in so much detail that developers have all but no choice in incorporating fan feedback when making updates.
We talk on all of these points and more in the full episode of Talk and Block embedded below, and would love to hear your thoughts (both here as well as in the comments directly on YouTube) on the matter too. Give our discussion a listen and chime in as we all try to articulate our feelings and hopes for SF6 as it evolves forward.
Timestamps:
00:00 – The SF6 honeymoon is over
09:52 – Developers MUST listen to players, but it’s a double-edged sword
18:33 – The politics of game balance
Michael Johnson is a tech enthusiast with a passion for all things digital. His articles cover the latest technological innovations, from artificial intelligence to consumer gadgets, providing readers with a glimpse into the future of technology.
