The game sold almost 500,000 more copies over the past quarter
Street Fighter 6 recently celebrated its first anniversary last month, and we now have an update as to how the flagship fighting game continued to perform after launch.
Capcom just recently held their latest financial presentation for the first quarter of the new fiscal year, which revealed new sales figures for SF6 and the franchise as a whole while apparently doing so impressively compared to its predecessor.
According to their official presentation material, Street Fighter 6 managed to push an additional 469,000 copies from April 1 through June 30, 2024.
Since we previously knew that the game reached 3.3 million copies sold worldwide after the last quarter, this pushes the newest Street Fighter’s total to 3.77 million in one year on the market.
That was enough to keep it among Capcom’s best sellers of the period within 14,000 copies of Resident Evil 4 and 8,000 better than the newer Dragon’s Dogma 2.
It wasn’t enough to keep up with the juggernaut of the company that is Monster Hunter with World and Rise still managing to put up huge numbers, but SF6 is showing itself to have consistent push through for sales thus far.
Things may become a bit more difficult to keep that pace moving into the game’s second season of content yet, but perhaps the big Evo 2024 turnout and hype for the series’ first guest characters Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui will help continue that trend.
This also means Street Fighter 6 managed to more than double the sales of its predecessor, Street Fighter 5, across their respective first years on the market.
From February 2016 until the end of March 2017, SF5 only managed to ship out 1.6 million copies in its initial year, and 1.4 million of that came during the first month and a half.
Capcom had set their sales expectation at 2 million over that first quarter, so it fell considerably short and continued to do poorly in the following months.
Although the game would recover with continued support and eventually reach 7.5 million copies, SF5’s poor launch was pretty darn grim for the company and community.
It took Street Fighter 5 until the fiscal quarter ending in June 30, 2019 to reach 3.7 million copies sold, which was over three years and four months.
There’s not really just one reason why SF6 is performing so well compared to the last game, but a combination of factors allowing the current generation to seemingly thrive.
Compared to SF5, Street Fighter 6 had a much better reception from the casual and competitive communities, strong word of mouth, build up of goodwill and Capcom themselves having a much improved reputation compared to where they were at in 2016.
The more recent sales marking the game down to as low as 50% off probably helped it quite a bit these past couple of months too.
Interestingly, this also means SF6 has already crossed the one-third mark of the lifetime goal set out for it before release.
Capcom President and COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto revealed he wanted the fighter to hit at least 10 million copies before all was said and done, which they’ve reached almost 38% of in one year.
Typically, video games sell the vast majority of their copies in the first months after launch, but the continued support approach for fighting games has shown consistent sales carrying through year after year like we saw through SF5, Tekken 7 and now Guilty Gear Strive.
So while the pace of sales may never quite match what was there in the first two months, there will hopefully be enough momentum to keep support going and bringing in new players, especially with larger updates down the line like we saw with Street Fighter 5: Arcade Edition and Champion Edition.
Capcom supported SF5 with DLC until late 2021 with Luke, so that equates to over five and a half years.
Unless we hear otherwise, Street Fighter 6 probably has a similarly long life ahead of it with even more content and expansions being worked on to evolve the project into something that’ll probably be quite a bit different from where it started in June 2023.
So hitting that 10 million at some point is looking pretty darn likely, which would mark the first single fighting game release for the company to do so.