The launch of Street Fighter 5 was all sorts of disappointing- here was a game that may just be the greatest fighting game ever created, at least if we went by the mechanics, but one that was done in by an absolute dearth of content, a lack of basic features, and just general polish, that made the game feel more early access than anything else.
The game garnered negative word of mouth as a result, missing its low sales target of 2 million copies sold, and garnering the lowest Metascore the series has had in years- and now, just a few months after the game’s launch, publisher Capcom are admitting that they may have rushed Street Fighter 5 to the market.
“Some aspects of Street Fighter 5 needed more polish, such as the lack of content and server issues at launch,” Capcom CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto said during the company’s earnings report recently, the English translation of which was published today. “Accordingly, we feel it’s better to give a little more time to development than before, and have made slight adjustments to our portfolio.”
I guess that, at least, is good news- Street Fighter 5 may have suffered, but it sounds like Capcom have learned their lesson from the ordeal. May we see less of these kinds of cynical, unfinished games on the market in the future.