And then we ended up with 5 seasons
Saying that Street Fighter 5 got off to a rough start is putting it lightly, and Capcom themselves were apparently ready to jump ship early.
Game Informer recently released a new article going through Street Fighter’s 35-year history where it was revealed SF5 was originally planned to feature 6 seasons of new DLC content before getting cut back.
The information comes from Street Fighter 6 Director Takayuki Nakayama, who came on to also direct SF5 after it had launched.
“Street Fighter 5 was originally planned to have six seasons, but then plans ended up changing, and we were told we could only make up to season four,” said Nakayama via Game Informer.
Unfortunately, the director doesn’t go into further detail as to why the cuts were made or when that decision was put in place, but there are some easy inferences to make.
With SF5 underperforming in its launch sales and continuing to struggle through its second year in 2017, it would make sense that Capcom would scale back their plans for the game and move on from it sooner, and then there was also the entire Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite debacle later that year too.
But wait, you might be asking, “Street Fighter 5 ended up with 5 seasons right?”
That is correct though that final season getting to happen at all was apparently indeed thanks to the fans and the positive reception of Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition.
We almost missed out on all of this
Players came very close it seems to completely missing out on Dan, Rose, Oro, Akira and Luke, which is pretty jarring to think about now, especially since only 1 of them is on the launch roster of Street Fighter 6.
Season 5 itself wasn’t the only shakeup Capcom made to the game either, as longtime Producer Yoshinori Ono left the company after the announcement — although there’s no new information present to explain why that was.
The developers also drastically changed their communication methods with fans that went over so we’ll they’ll likely continue a similar approach going forward.
“Starting with Season 5, we changed the structure of the team, and we learned that we wanted to take on a more direct communication style with the audience and players of the game,” said Nakayama. “We received a lot of positive feedback about that. We realized that is very important for our audience.”
This revelation leaves players with a brand new question they didn’t have before being who would have been included in Season 6?”
Unless the devs eventually come out and say it, we’ll likely never know the answer, or there’s a real possibility that character choices weren’t even planned out that far by the time cuts were made.
There could have been some of the fighters who had files datamined out of SF5 like Sodom, but that may remain a mystery.
As things stand now, Street Fighter 5 wrapped up with 45 characters (46 if you count Eleven) and in a completely different state than where it was at almost 7 years ago.
It would have been cool to see the game reach an even 50. That’s still a lot better than 40 though.
