In Street Fighter 6 every time a DLC character has been released, we’ve seen either major or minor updates to the game engine, the balance of the cast or both. This fact hasn’t been actively discussed by most people in the community.
Rashid included mostly bug fixes, but also had a new Drive Rush cancel input, A.K.I. added Drive Gauge meter changes, and adjusted how burnout works for a large portion of the cast. The Ed patch added a ton of major balance adjustments, and was similar to a Season .5 adjustment that we saw in the prior game.
The Akuma update is set to arrive at the end of May or sometime in June, and is expected to kick off the Season 2 balance changes, which should be substantial for all of the roster members who weren’t touched during the Ed update for Street Fighter 6.
If this pattern continues, it means that with every DLC character that comes out for Street Fighter 6, it’s likely we’ll see some changes, potentially very significant ones.
One of the most consistent complaints I see when I read through the comments is about the size of the roster and lack of some of the franchise’s most notable characters not being available. I think Capcom has heard these complaints as well, and it’s possible we’ll be seeing the amount of characters released in a Season increase from 4 to 5, and they will likely be coupled with even more balance adjustments.
We know the team likes to keep the character count close to the prior games, and there was even a push by the developers of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 to beat Marvel vs. Capcom 2’s roster count of 56 characters, but that didn’t pan out, due to some unfortunate circumstances.
Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro
0:17 – Frequency of Balance Updates in Street Fighter 6
2:21 – DLC roster size increase
6:03 – Development time for fighting games
8:19 – DLC costs breakdown and game comparison
11:38 – Thank you for watching
Given the history, increasing the amount of DLC characters per season makes sense for Street Fighter 6, or it’ll take a long time for this game to match the roster sizes of prior titles.
Street Fighter 4 launched with 25 characters on console, and added 10 more with the Super SF4 update a bit over a year later, bringing it up to 35.
Street Fighter 5 launched with 16 characters, and added 8 more, in a year’s time, bringing it up to 24 characters.
Street Fighter 6 will be out for a year in June 2024, it launched with 18 characters, and will have added 4 more with Akuma’s inclusion, increasing the count to a total of 22.
As such, to keep pace with the prior titles, I could see Capcom trying to ramp up production a bit.
With Street Fighter 5, we saw generally two significant updates per year. One major update, and then one mid-range, which sometimes brought large changes to the balance of the game and mechanics. Right there we know that Capcom is open to doing major adjustments more than once per year based on their history.
There were also, in SF5, a handful of one-off patches that also brought various balance adjustments, but most of them were considered minor, so it’s possible we could see some stuff outside of DLC character releases too in the future.
There are high expenses for updates to these games as well. We’ve heard the expense for submitting a patch is very high, so it makes sense to bundle balance updates together with DLC characters to save money. There’s a happy medium to keep in terms of what gamers will pay for DLC, and what it costs developers to create and budget for these things.
We know that Street Fighter 6 was in development for about 5 years, with around 300 total staff working on the game. It took 4 months to design a fireball, and about 6 months to create A.K.I.’s model in the game. All of this stuff adds up, especially when you factor in things like servers and other expenses.
Katsuhiro Harada, the Director of fighting games for Bandai Namco, noted that a 3D game like Tekken is more expensive than a 2.5D game like Street Fighter to make assets for, at least, that’s his assumption. He feels like Street Fighter is about half of the cost of Tekken, because of the nature of how the games work, but this was said about 3 years ago.
Harada also said back in February of this year that development costs are now 10 times more expensive than in the 1990’s and more than double or nearly triple the cost of Tekken 7, which was released in 2017 on the consoles.
Sales are a big deal for these games however, as when Tekken 7 was initially pitched, they only had planned on two seasons of DLC, but the game did so well that Harada took the numbers to his bosses and got approved for additional DLC seasons.
Circumstance can also play a factor beyond sales, as when Street Fighter 6 wasn’t ready when it was expected to be, another Season of Street Fighter 5 got approved so Capcom had some fresh and new content for the game. SF5 also had relatively strong sales though, currently at 7.4 million copies moved.
Capcom is using the Reach for the Moon (RE Engine) for Street Fighter 6 which is an in-house program they made themselves, and that also saves them time and money in the long run. Games developed on the Unreal Engine had issues with input delay until recently, and Capcom’s engine was able to avoid these same problems at the launch for their latest fighting game.
As such, given the history, it’s looking very likely that whenever we see a new DLC character released for Street Fighter 6, they’ll come coupled with a minor or major balance update to save on costs.