Though Capcom’s Street Fighter 4 had a huge roster available, unlike the upcoming Street Fighter 5 which only has 16 characters, it took several years to ultimately come to that point. Series producer Yoshinori Ono spoke to Eurogamer about the same and along with outlining how much time it would take for Street Fighter 5 to catch up, he basically revealed his desire to support the game for the same period of time.
“A lot of it will depend on once the game’s out in the wild, and if the model we make comes to fruition and I can be proven right about it being the right choice.
“Simple maths suggests it’d take five years to get to the roster of Street Fighter 4, and we want to keep the game going for that amount of time. We want to support it as long as we can, we honestly will have to see – we don’t know anymore than anyone else does how it’s going to turn out next February, once we do this completely new way of doing things.”
This “completely new way” is essentially by offering new characters after launch with Fight Money, which can either be earned by playing through the game or with Zenny (aka real world money). Street Fighter 5 is out on February 16th 2016 for PC and PS4 so we’ll see how this formula works.