Despite being the go-to place for the biggest fighting games back on the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s consoles have faced struggles with the genre over the past two generations.
Those woes will apparently be continuing for those hoping to get the recently announced Capcom Fighting Collection 2 on the platform.
Following the surprise reveal, the developer confirmed the places we’ll be able to play the likes of Capcom vs. SNK 2, Power Stone and Project Justice will be the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam.
This continues a trend of Capcom not releasing their recent collections on Xbox at all as well as a native PlayStation 5 version — though of course it can still be played through backwards compatibility.
The company did face some backlash for the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection skipping over Xbox earlier this year, but that apparently wasn’t enough to get them to change their minds.
What is a bit interesting, however, is that the upcoming Ace Attorney Investigations Collection will be coming to Xbox on September 6 along with the other typical platforms.
This may lend some further credence to the theory that the MT Framework engine is a major factor behind the absence on Xbox consoles of late.
Around the time of the MvC collection reveal, reporting suggested that Capcom currently doesn’t have a development pipeline to bring MT Framework titles to Xbox’s modern ERA system.
Said limitation is also coupled with MT Framework not officially supporting the PS5 nor Xbox Series X|S, which likely explains the former’s missing status too.
While MT Framework was Capcom’s in-house game engine of choice built for the Xbox 360 / PlayStation 3 / Nintendo Wii era, it has continued to live on despite most new titles moving on to the current RE Engine like Street Fighter 6.
The most prevalent place to see MT in newer releases comes in Capcom’s collections where they appear to have crafted something of a base they can revisit as needed — like the ability to add rollback netcode, lobbies and new training modes to old arcade fighting games.
Capcom Fighting Collection 2, like the MvC collection, appears to still be using MT while we’ve gotten no indication that the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is.
It is a bit weird, however, that the first Capcom Fighting Collection did launch on Xbox in 2022, which seems to be the last MT Framework title to come to Microsoft’s console.
Our previous research and talks with developers pointed to Microsoft not blocking a release of a new Xbox One title that doesn’t have an official Series X|S version though it likely wouldn’t receive the same amount of push and support from the company either.
This still has us believing that it would likely be technically possible for Capcom to fix / make adjustments to the current MT Framework base for Xbox compatibility, but the financial incentive may not be there for the company.
Although we don’t have exact metrics, Xbox appears to make up a noticeably small piece of the fighting game pie now in terms of sales compared to PlayStation and PC — potentially as low as 10–15% (but don’t quote us on that because it’s just a rough estimation).
Capcom clearly aren’t averse to releasing games on Xbox like we’ve seen with Street Fighter 6, the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection and the upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds, but they may not feel it’s worth jumping through extra hoops to do so for a collection of older fighting games at this point.
There is still a chance this could be rectified in the future, especially if Microsoft themselves step in to try and get the titles on their platforms, but we’re not holding our breath for that at this point.
And as a compilation of arcade games, it won’t make a massive difference to miss out on a native PS5 version, but it’d still certainly be nice to take advantage of the newer console’s features (especially since it’s almost 4 years old at this point).
The Capcom Fighting Collection 2 is set to release in 2025, so we should be learning more about it in the months to come.