Look to the past for answers on the future
One thing we’ve heard over and over again for many months is that fans of Street Fighter 6 want Capcom to take their money in exchange for new costumes for their characters.
Given how important DLC sales are to a game’s overall performance and how well costumes have done traditionally in the prior two Street Fighter games, this situation is mind boggling from the outside looking in. However, there are likely a couple of very big reasons why we haven’t seen outfit 4 for most of the cast.
Please take a good long look at Birdie’s outfit here from Street Fighter 5, and note how much clipping is happening with his hair, chain and hand.
This was a notorious problem in the prior game, especially when characters loaded up on the 2nd player side on the character select screen, and one that’s generally much less of an issue in Street Fighter 6.
While you can find instances of clipping and problematic visuals in Street Fighter 6, the current game has a much higher level of polish and presentation than its predecessor. This level of quality and attention to detail takes time.
I’m sure numerous fans would argue that it’s better to push out an inferior quality product and generate the cash for it, Street Fighter 6’s developers have been very diligent about not repeating mistakes from the recent past, and have generally delivered on doing so.
4K resolution displays are much more common across PCs and consoles than they were in the prior game, and putting together costumes that not only look good at 1080p, but 4K as well, take additional time and resources to develop, especially if you plan on releasing them for all of the game’s 24 cast members (soon to be 25 with Mai in February).
Considering we know that it took about two months to make A.K.I.’s clothes in Street Fighter 6, there’s some simple math we can do here. Two months multiplied by the 24 cast members is four years… ouch.
Outfit 3 was released over a year ago for the base cast, so by this logic, about 1/4th (six) of the costumes should be ready to go at this time.
While I’m sure Capcom would love to release them all in one go, there’s a really simple solution they can put in place with Mai Shiranui’s release date on February 5, 2025.
It wasn’t that long ago, in the Street Fighter 4 and 5 days where Capcom would release costumes for specific characters at one time, or in a themed package like for the Capcom Pro Tour.
While it’s been pretty awesome to get updated costumes for most of the cast in Street Fighter 6 all at once, it’s not like the approach in the previous games was highly detrimental from a sales perspective.
There are always going to be complaints from users that they aren’t getting enough costumes or they hate the ones available. That has been happening since alternative costumes were announced for Street Fighter 4.
The thing is… the previous model has worked so well, of releasing costumes in smaller batches, the solution seems pretty obvious here.
Since fans have waited for over a year, release as many outfits as you have available right now with Mai. Then, in the future, release them about every 4-6 months with as many as you have ready.
The Fighting Game Community loves to dress up their characters, and I find it hard to believe Capcom doesn’t have at least a handful of these costumes ready to go for some cast members.
Some is better than none. Push out what you have, let the player base pay you a bunch of money to access these cosmetic improvements, and use that money to produce more costumes in a timely fashion. To quote The Office, it’s a win-win-win scenario.
Capcom recently said that they were surprised by the data they’ve received showing them to be very popular thus far, so it’s clear these alternative costumes are still selling well in Street Fighter 6.
Use these resources to make the game better and get more costumes created for the entire cast. It shouldn’t be this difficult to access more cosmetic options that the community has literally been begging for, for months.
Let us dress up the characters we love more, please Capcom, it shouldn’t be this difficult.
Source: Event Hubs
