Up until a week ago, it was thought that Elena was going to release at some point in April or May for Street Fighter 6, but turns out that’s not the case after all.
We now know thanks to the teaser trailer that Elena is coming as the last Season 2 DLC character on June 5, which has implications for the Street Fighter scene as a whole.
Presumably, Capcom is also going to release the big Season 3 balance update at the same time as Elena like they did last year for Akuma.
Now that the patch is likely not coming until June as well, that will produce some issues for the competitive scene of SF6 specifically.
Part of the reason many believed Elena would come in April or May was the fact that the Capcom Pro Tour 2025 season is starting up in less than a month.
It looks like currently, however, the third competitive year is going to begin while still playing the second season of the game.
And it’s not just for one event either.
There’s Evo Japan 2025 with the second largest Evo bracket ever taking place from May 9–11 and then Combo Breaker 2025 at the end of the month too.
#EvoJapan2025 の大会エントリー数が公開されました
『スト6』部門にエントリーいただいた、
【6,653名】のみなさん『ストIII 3rd 』部門にエントリーいただいた、
【355名 71チーム】のみなさん楽しみつつトーナメントに臨んでください… pic.twitter.com/NszzVN2xeg
— ストリートファイター / STREET FIGHTER (@StreetFighterJA) April 16, 2025
That’s two of the limited offline event Capcom Cup slots up for grabs running on the “old” version of the game while the rest of the season will presumably be run on Season 3’s updates.
This shows now there is a pretty clear disconnection between the content aspect of Street Fighter 6 and the competitive scene.
We did get a taste of this last year when Akuma and the Season 2 update came right before Combo Breaker 2024, and then it happened again with M. Bison’s launch and CEO 2024.
That was a bit different, however, since those majors were not part of the CPT circuit, but now we’re seeing it at a bigger level.
This is all plans from Capcom directly, and it’s weird that they’d be apparently out of sync like this.
As far as we know, a Capcom Pro Tour season (at least since Street Fighter 5) has not begun running on the previous year’s version of the game.
We’re not sure of course what’s causing this disconnect whether it be an internal delay of Elena and the Season 3 patch or other scheduling conflicts, but there’s something going on behind the scenes.
This desync can even be seen in the content reveals too with Elena’s teaser skipping Capcom Cup 11 for some reason and instead dropping on a seemingly random Thursday connected to nothing — and that goes for pretty much all events now outside of Evo.
Obviously, the new content is where Street Fighter 6 is going to make pretty much all of the game’s money now, but the Capcom Pro Tour also positions itself as the leader of FGC pro circuits.
And we’re not really seeing any other fighting games have this issue either.
We’ve seen before how the development pipeline for SF6 does not appear to be moving as fast as fans expect considering how long it’s taken to get Outfit 4 options in the game — and we still haven’t seen those yet after almost a year and a half since Outfit 3 dropped.
Games are more expensive and complicated to develop than ever before, but again, it just feels weird that it’s taking the team this long to get content out the door compared to Street Fighter 5 and their current competition.
Mortal Kombat 1 dropped like six new fighters in the time it took SF6 to get one, and Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves has committed to releasing new characters every two months before the game is even out.
Meanwhile, there’s a four-month gap between Mai and Elena.
And now that’s bled over into the competitive scene as well.
It just feels like a bit of a disservice now to the competitors who put more time into the game than anyone else.
But who knows, maybe Capcom has some more unexpected decisions they’ll be rolling out.
There’s nothing technically stopping them from dropping the Season 3 balance update before Elena though we have our doubts that would actually come to pass.
Instead, it looks like Street Fighter 6 is going to be starting the next leg of its journey with a disconnect to the dedicated community supporting the game most.
Hopefully, the Street Fighter 6 team starts to communicate more about what’s going on and what their plans are for the game like they did towards the end of the last entry.
We’re all ears here.
Source: Event Hubs
