The makers of Street Fighter 5 have revealed that the game initially intended six seasons of DLC content before being scaled down. While Capcom is presently preparing for the release of Street Fighter 6 next year, there was a lot of doubt regarding the game following the previous entry’s release. Street Fighter 5 had a problematic production, with a reasonably empty debut time and post-launch schedule for a couple of years.
Takayuki Nakayama, the current Street Fighter director, who had joined the project halfway through, detailed several of Street Fighter 5’s faults. He acknowledged in an interview with Game Informer that the game’s bare-bones debut was owing to a number of features under development by the game’s previous director, Yoshinori Ono, that were not completed in time for release. As a consequence, the game went through a lot of post-launch adjustments and course corrections, and Ono himself left Capcom in 2020. While a new post-launch strategy was being developed, certain cutbacks were made before it was even completed.
Nakayama claims that while management informed him and the production team they could only build up to season four of Street Fighter 5, the game had initially been intended to include six seasons of DLC. As a consequence, Street Fighter 5 Champion Edition was created, which is regarded as the most full and definitive version of the game, adding a lot to the title. While the match was not perfect, it was much superior to the vanilla version in 2016.
Because of the positive response to Champion Edition, Capcom reversed course and announced one last season for Street Fighter 5, which included five new characters. Nakayama mentions that the whole team’s structure and communication techniques changed for Season 5 when they understood that direct connection with their player base was critical. Takayuki Nakayama and producer Shuhei Matsumoto were put at the head of the production for the next mainstream entry as a consequence of the fifth game’s successful turnaround.
All of this leads back to the future Street Fighter 6, with development beginning at the conclusion of Street Fighter 5’s production in 2018. This resulted in Luke becoming SF5’s last DLC character, however, Nakayama saw him as a “guest character from the future” rather than the game’s final character. He saw that they were apprehensive about unveiling him since they wanted to display him appropriately. While fans may be disappointed that SF5 was eventually short-changed, the series’ future also seems to be bright with the sixth game.
