Capcom apologises for letting players down when Street Fighter 5 launched

Capcom has apologised to players for the way it handled the launch of Street Fighter 5.

The PS4 console exclusive was released in February 2016, and to celebrate the game’s eighth anniversary the company posted a message on the official Japanese Street Fighter account on X.

While the game eventually ended up with a dedicated player base, it had a troubled release, with mixed reviews and complaints about the lack of single-player content, its unstable online multiplayer and its limited initial roster of 16 characters (which eventually grew to 45).

While Capcom’s new message thanked fans of the game for their support, it also acknowledged the game’s poor start.

“Street Fighter 5 has celebrated its eighth anniversary,” the message reads.

“Durly the early and mid-stages of release we had network issues, a lack of content, etc. We are truly sorry that the content betrayed the expectations of many of you.

“After a lot of reflection, the Street Fighter 5 development team worked hard from the middle to the end of the game, to resolve the issues as much as possible.

“By the end, there were 45 playable characters, and the battle system had added V Skills/Trigger II, V Shift, etc.

“Thanks to you, the number of players playing Street Fighter 5 has increased significantly since Season 4. We remember how happy we felt about this. Even now, thousands of people are still playing Street Fighter 5. We’rereally happy about this too!

“Above all, the most important point was that we were able to apply this reflection to Street Fighter 6.

“We once again feel that the past eight years of progress have been spent together with you all. Thank you so much.”

The game has since been succeeded by its sequel, Street Fighter 6, which has enjoyed a much better start with a Metacritic score of 92.

Street Fighter 6 was released in June and attracted one million players in its first three days, according to Capcom, which is targeting 10 million lifetime sales for the game.