It’s already been almost four months since Akuma finally took the stage in Street Fighter 6, and for a lot of players, it looks like he never left — though how many wins he’s been able to rack up may be a bit of a different story.
Capcom recently dropped the official character stats, rankings and matchup charts for Street Fighter 6 in the month of August 2024 where the demon faced both the highest highs and lowest lows almost across the board.
As we’ve continued to see from his late May release, Akuma continues to dominate almost all of the character usage rankings for all of the ranked matches played online over the past month with a few exceptions.
Overall, Akuma actually gained 0.5% representation over July where M. Bison almost caught up to to the previous DLC character, meaning he appeared in a whopping 12.3% of all ranked sets with Ken being the only other to reach double digits at 10.3%
Bison dropped from second to fourth while Ryu and Cammy managed to keep holding onto their top five positions where Zangief, Ed and Juri remain sitting on the bubble.
The lower ranks are where Akuma is less popular as low as fifth place, but going from Gold all the way through Master, the demon reigns supreme.
Besides Master, his average was even slightly better, but Bison is still hanging onto his second position in those highest ranked players.
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Across the board, we’re seeing Dhalsim, E. Honda., Lily, Kimberly and Blanka making up some combination of the bottom four slots, so they continue to not really resonate with players of any skill level — which is why we recently argued that some of these Street Fighter 2 staples probably shouldn’t be automatic includes anymore.
What’s perhaps most interesting, however, is that despite Rashid coming across as a fairly popular and top tier candidate at actual SF6 tournaments, he’s right down there in the bottom six or so generally too.
And when we’re looking at the matchup charts as to who is actually winning all of these online sets, there’s almost an inverse effect going on.
Akuma isn’t at the very bottom of Master-ranked win rates, that goes to Ryu, but he’s at least in the bottom two going all the way down to Gold.
Heck, you have to look at Iron players to even find a place where Akuma has a positive win record across the board.
Meanwhile, characters like Dhalsim, E. Honda, Kimberly, JP and Rashid are statistically performing the best though that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Since their player base is around 10–20% of that for Akuma and Ken, each match they enter will carry more weight, and by the time of reaching Master, typically only character specialists are going to keep using them.
That can also give the less popular characters another advantage in unfamiliarity to others in the matchup, but it also doesn’t guarantee an auto win or full advantage across the board.
Bison had the highest Master win rate in July, and though he fell to eighth in August, he still ended up with a positive rate overall.
The only other “popular” character who can claim that feat is Cammy, so the likes of Ryu, Ed, Zangief and Juri are all batting under 500 too.
And while that may sound a bit stark on its face, looking at the actual numbers being represented is also important as well since it shows everybody is wildly close to each other.
In Master, the highest win rate is just 5.167 while the lowest is 4.895, so that’s just over a quarter of a point difference between 23 characters.
Each match has to have a winner and a loser. Since characters like Akuma and Ken are more popular, they have more opportunities to lose.
But since the results are still this close despite the factors on both ends, SF6 is currently looking pretty darn balanced at the top of online play.
Things do separate out more at the ranks below Master, but even then, they hardly reach more than a point.
It’ll certainly be fascinating to see what Terry Bogard can do to shake up both the popularity rankings and win rate when he releases on September 24, but we’ll have to wait a full month from now to look at what the stats say.
More information and rankings can be found on the official Buckler’s Boot Camp site.