Street Fighter 5 should have been a slam dunk home run. The long awaited fifth entry in the perennially popular fighting game series, with its gameplay refined to absolute pitch perfection. And yet the game is a total non entity in the larger gaming market (outside of the core fighting game community) at this point, simply because outside of the actual gameplay, Capcom eded up messing up everything else. There was a paucity of content at launch, as well as modes and single player features. If you were buying it, you better be a competitive fighter, or there was no point.
There is a lot of fear that Capcom will similarly mess up the upcoming Marvel vs Capcom Infinite. However, speaking to VG247 in a surprisingly candid interview, Producer Mike Evans contritely admitted that Capcom had learned from the botched launch of Street Fighter, and was looking to not make similar mistakes again.
“For Marvel vs Capcom Infinite the lessons learned from SF5… some of which were really about what users expect from a day one product – we want to take our time and make sure it’s fully featured on day one,” he said. “We talked about the cinematic story mode, the arcade mode, online lobbies and all that. We’re really taking our time, we’re going to release it when it’s ready. That’s kind of a new direction, but it’s also stepping away from some of the innovations in terms of the cross platform stuff that we tried for the first time with SF5. We decided that for Infinite it’s just a better approach to try to get it into as many hands as possible on day one so that tons of people can enjoy it.”
I mean, of course, these aren’t lessons that Street Fighter 5‘s failure should have had to teach them, you’d think this is common enough sense. But fine, I’m not going to harp on it because they’ve learned, and are promising that Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite will be better. Let’s hope it is.