Fighting games are a global experience that quite literally cross borders, and stronger rollback netcode is now allowing more players to level up their game by taking on stronger opponents from farther away.
The great Cat Cammy recently put together a couple of new info charts for Street Fighter 6 that are a bit different than their usual by looking at how many Master ranked players there are in countries around the world and who they’re playing.
Their Master players ratio chart breaks down which countries have the highest amount of their players in the top ranks with some fascinating results.
Would you be surprised to see Japan up at the very top? Because they most certainly are.
Between their over 430,000 online players, Japan has over 67,000 of them in the top ranks, which equates to around 15.65% of their game population.
That’s pretty darn nuts when you look at the United States as the country with the second-most amount of players total and in Master, but they’re like 22nd in terms of their ratio.
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With 303,000 players using the American flag and over 19,000 of them in Master or higher, that percentage is less than half of Japan at 6.49% behind the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France (though our total numbers still obviously dwarf all of them combined).
The Dominican Republic is actually the second highest on the list with 15.2% of their online players in Master though that’s out of just under 6,300 users.
Following them, we see Chile, Brazil, South Korea, Argentina, and the Philippines as the countries with over 10% of their game population that high.
It’s also pretty nuts to see that Japan is the only country with more than 1,000 players with 1,700 MR points or higher with a whopping 4,811, which is more than most of these have for total Master ranks.
#StreetFighter6 #SF6 Percent of Players that reach Master and Master with 1700 or more MR for the top 25 countries with more players. Remember that this is based on the profile flag that each player selects in game. pic.twitter.com/XARYXqlDsV
— Cat Cammy (SF6 Stats and Data) (@CatCammy6) April 10, 2024
This obviously doesn’t mean one country is better than another, but it is interesting to see how many people in them are grinding online and how far they’re getting.
We can see that further broken down in the second chart where Japan’s Master players make up almost half of the total base at the top with the United States coming in second with 11.76%.
This chart also includes the amount of Legend players per country and again, Japan’s numbers are pretty staggering.
They have 304 competitors in Legend, which makes up over 67% of the highest ranks possible, while China is in second place except they only have 32 — and a handful of these top countries don’t apparently have any right now.
Cat Cammy also ranked each country’s character usage rates for Master where we can see some pretty unsurprising results at the top considering almost every single one of them has either Ken or Ryu at number one.
The only exceptions are JP in the Dominican Republic, Cammy in the Philippines, and funnily enough, Dee Jay being the top choice in his home of Jamaica by almost a full 10%.
Across the board, Lily was the least represented in all but six countries though Dhalsim, Blanka, Kimberly and all of the DLC characters are down there too.
#StreetFighter6 #SF6 Breakdown of Master Rank by country, counting only active players in the last month and highest ranked character for each one. If you like this kind of data, you can support by following me or at buy me a coffee pic.twitter.com/b2mheA0096
— Cat Cammy (SF6 Stats and Data) (@CatCammy6) April 9, 2024
Japan’s top five are probably about what you’d expect with Ken, Luke, Dee Jay, Juri and Cammy (with JP at six) while America interestingly has Zangief up there too — alongside Mexico, Argentina, Italy and Sweden.
These numbers aren’t going to be entirely accurate considering you can set your country flag to anywhere in SF6, but it’s still going to probably be the most accurate look we can get overall at the global power levels.
You may also notice that the numbers themselves are different between the charts, and that’s because the one with characters is only counting “active players” who’ve been in at least one match the past month.
If you missed it before, make sure to check out our breakdown of Cat Cammy’s previous SF6 charts showing match ups for a Master characters with the same amount of points.