This year, two games where a multicultural cast fight each other for no good reason were released. February brought the newest game in the Street Fighter series, and May brought Blizzard's new shooter Overwatch.

With the former being a 1v1 fighting game and the latter being a team-based shooter, it's not likely that these games are in direct competition. But for some, Overwatch's release represents a big threat to Street Fighter V.

Street Fighter veteran Arturo “TS Sabin” Sanchez brought up this topic on his Twitter recently. Sanchez quickly made a name for himself in SFV, staying on top of the game's leaderboards for a long time and being the first person to reach to Diamond ranking in the game.

According to Sanchez and other players responding to him, Street Fighter V players are dropping off the game in favor of Overwatch. Former training partners are taking time off and skipping sessions to play Blizzard's shooter instead. This could be players getting fed up with Street Fighter V's issues and Capcom's seeming unwillingness to fix them.

Capcom Cup and EVO champion Yusuke Momochi has even started streaming Overwatch. That's just one big example, but there are plenty of prominent Street Fighter players who are either playing or streaming Overwatch regularly.

So is this a huge issue? Will Overwatch drain the last lifeblood out of the barely-living Street Fighter V corpse?

The short answer is “no”. The long answer is “no”, but with a few more words after that “no” describing what's happening.

Overwatch is huge. It has likely already outsold Street Fighter V. Lots of competitive Street Fighter V players are trying out Overwatch and having a lot of fun, which makes sense because the game is incredibly fun and dynamic. It's similar to a fighting game, being highly competitive games with unique characters. Compared to previous Blizzard games, Overwatch had a nearly perfect launch. The servers are fine, the gameplay is balanced and enjoyable, and any bugs were quickly fixed.

Meanwhile, Street Fighter V is in a rough spot. The game stumbled at launch and is still working on recovery. I've already spoken on the small issues that the game is full of, but some bigger things have happened more recently. Ibuki was announced and subsequently delayed, throwing off Capcom's one character per month schedule.

There was some other weirdness with this delay, including Capcom Japan blaming Capcom USA and the players getting rightfully upset about the lack of transparency. Why don't we know when a DLC character is coming out until a few days before? A delay would have been fine if they gave some notice or had one unifed source to get info on this.

There's also the growing issue of Street Fighter V's input delay, and top players feeling like the game is actively suffering because of it.

Despite all this, I think Street Fighter V will be fine. At Combo Breaker 2016, SFV had an entrant cap because the venue couldn't support the amount of people wanting to compete. That cap was raised and it still filled up.

Street Fighter V is currently the largest EVO tournament of all time with over 2,227 entrants.

Personally, I've seen more people coming to local fighting game gatherings to play Street Fighter V and other games. For the competitive community, it's a smash hit.

The excitement around SFV is also helping the fighting game community as a whole. New players are coming to see the new Street Fighter. And if it's not their cup of tea, they've been introduced to the genre at a time of huge diversity. Guilty Gear, Mortal Kombat, Skullgirls, King of Fighters, Tekken and a countless number of anime games I can't spell are all on the scene right now. If you're not enjoying Street Fighter V, there's another fighting game out there right now to pick up.

I'm currently on a break from playing Street Fighter V, because I was grinding hard for months to prepare for Combo Breaker. And I have been playing a lot of Overwatch instead of Street Fighter.

That's fine!

Fighting games like SFV are mentally and physically taxing. If you've been playing nothing but that since Februrary, taking a break is a great idea.

A break from fighting games has tons of benefits. If your matches feel like you're on autopilot, taking a break gives you time to think and build up valuable strategies for your return. If you're losing all the time and getting frustrated, it's actually not a good idea to train even harder. You should take a break, review your game plan and pick up new approaches, and come back to the game mentally refreshed.

Overwatch isn't even a month old, and Street Fighter V is a few months old. I believe both games will coexist, and Street Fighter fans will be drawn back in with the massive June update. I've already seen people who were burned out on SF getting excited for June.

If there's one benefit of staggered content releases, it's that a new character or mode will excite the community again. We'll see tech monsters creating setups for Ibuki in June, Third Strike fans coming to the game to play Urien at his release, and maybe an infusion of casual players thanks to the game's story expansion and the game finally going on sale.

I don't think the Street Fighter community has to worry about Overwatch taking all of its players away. If you're into Street Fighter or fighting games in general, nothing will keep you away from mashing buttons for too long. Fighting gamers are spoiled for choice in their genre right now, and Street Fighter players are just in the middle of a content lull right now. Once the June update hits, the excitement for Street Fighter will spike and we'll all be back in.

We shouldn't be worried about Street Fighter players leaving for Overwatch. Now we've got a second game to play with friends in addition to Street Fighter. They're not competition, they are complements, and the more great games to play, the better.

Not really, they both provide entirely different experiences. If anything is killing the SFV community it's Capcom and the shitty quality product that is SFV.

If Overwatch is a side effect of people being done with putting up with Capcoms terrible management then that's the only correlation I can see having any actual grounds.

@baronsamedi: Capcom's biggest enemy right now is itself, definitely.

Overwatch has already way outsold Street Fighter. I think Street Fighter sold like 1.75 million and Overwatch sold over 7 million already. It's not close at all.

Also the idea that SF V should be forgiven because "Every first version of every fighting game known to man been rocky" is just ridiculous. Look at MK X. Did it launch perfect? No. Especially on PC (where it was never fully fixed.) But it was feature complete and didn't need a bunch of modes added after the fact. Street Fighter IV also launched feature complete. Street Fighter V launched bare bones AND IS STILL BARE BONES MONTHS LATER. It was thoroughly botched, especially for more casual fans who want something other than online vs fighting. You may like Street Fighter more than Mortal Kombat, but they are the two biggest names in fighting, and in terms of modes and stuff to do the competition isn't even close.

As for Overwatch, it does have a lot in common with a fighting game (Colorful characters with lots of personalities and defined moves for example) but the only reason it could "kill" the community is that people are dissatisfied with SF V and looking for other stuff to play.

Street Fighter 5s launch was a disaster and Capcom have no one to blame but themselves. On a side note that sabin fellow needs to chill the out and let people whatever they want to play, Overwatch is a polished refined game whilst Street Fighter 5 most certainly is not.

I played against a user called PerfectLegend in Overwatch last weekend. Not sure if that was the real PL but their Mei was kinda free.

SFV will bring people in with the June update. I personally still play way more SFV than Overwatch since SFV is a better game.

SFV is a weird game; mechanically SFV is easily the best fighter out there, but lack of features put a lot of people off. So weird, the most important part of street fighter 5, the fighting, is the best the series has seen. Its funny cause even I'm pissed off at capcom for not including features I probably would've never touched.

I'd be pretty tempted to switch if I were playing games professionally and could make more money by playing Overwatch. Especially if I was a full time streamer on Twitch or something.

Maybe people are just burning out on fighting games; their popularity seems to rise and fall. Then again, like the OP mentions, tournament participation seems to only go up.

As an aside, are there really a ton of people out there who want to buy a Street Fighter game for the story? Do you think SFV launching without a story mode did substantial harm to its sales figures?

@cmblasko: I don't think anybody really sees a STORY mode as more than a nice little extra if it's good (like the MK stories have been good) but basic ARCADE mode where you can play AI? I think that's VERY popular. A lot of people use it to learn the game, or just to chill and play when they don't feel like intense competition online.

Street fighter stories are impenetrable and who cares anyway, but a $60 fighting game with a smallish cast should have some kind of single player mode. Not everyone wants to play online all the time.

Not everything is the fault of overwatch guys!
Just calm down and fix street fighter! Although it might be approaching the point of no return, where the damage has been done.

The only thing that's killing Street Fighter is Capcom.

I'm with Art on that second tweet. My twitter feed is like 90% Overwatch stuff now.

I do feel a bit sorry for Capcom, even if a fair bit of the way they've handle the whole situation has been pretty poor. The start of the Capcom Pro Tour basically gave them no opportunity to give the game a delay, which is probably really needed, and they've been behind the ball ever since.

Anyway, SFV will be ok because it's a good game.

If SFV were going to lose some players to anything, I'd sooner hope it would be -REVELATOR-!

@cmblasko: I think it must have had some impact. Mortal Kombat X had a significant story and plenty stuff for solo players to do. If you compare their launch periods, MKX vastly outsold SFV.

The story itself might not be important, but casual players do care about having something to do and clearly Survival didn't cut it.

@yesiamaduck: Calling Street Fighter V unpolished and unrefined is a bit much when the actual fighting mechanics are some of the most solid in the genre. Yeah Overwatch didn't have the server problems of SFV, but Overwatch also came from a gigantic company with tons of money that knows online games better than any other developer. Both honestly both suffer from the same big problem which is lack of content. Overwatch feels just as thin as SFV did. The difference is that Overwatch is fresh and doesn't require you to be that good at it.

SFV's release is actually extremely typical for the Japanese fighting game dev cycle, including SFIV, in that historically almost every Japanese fighting game console release is technicially revision 2+, after an initial arcade release months or even a year+ previously. Really, it's a matter of perspective. I'll bet if you asked any of the hardcore Tekken fans out there, they would have been thrilled if Namco released their barebones arcade version on consoles back in March of last year. Instead they're still waiting for a reliable way to play, with their only opportunities coming once every month or so when Namco reps drag a version to a major fighting game tournament outside of Japan.

Not specifically, but the overall lack of SFV features dominated the discourse around the game leading up to release, and likely turned away a significant number of on-the-fence potential buyers.

Barrier to entry (player skill rather than difficulty of the game this time) plus terrible launch plus not improving much after the launch, almost every other fighting game is putting out a superior product just in terms of the features available. Overwatch, conversely, is doing well because of the lack of such a barrier (though it also doesn't really have that much content).

Overwatch is just taking ppl from everywhere not just SFV. Besides the usual Battleborn false dichotomy people like to protray, I've seen players from LoL and other multiplayer games announce they were switching. It's just a good game, a really good one.

If Capcom doesn't like what's happening to their playerbase on SFV, then perhaps they should try to flesh out the game like they should have in the first place to get the casuals/new players back, and cut the price to get retailers to help promote their game for them. They should also hit their release windows they promised for new characters. Right now they aren't giving people a whole lot to believe in. It's probably too late at this point to completely turn it around, but that's their only hope.

As for those who say Overwatch did the same thing. There are some key differences imo that make it a different experience for consumers. For One Overwatch is a new IP, so it doesn't have the same established consumer expectations of features. Furthermore it has a significantly bigger marketing budget so the risk of someone getting surprised by the lack of a campaign mode is probably a lot lower. And you can get it for 40 dollars with all the characters unlike SFV. And it's a team based game so it isn't as demoralizing a trying to ladder in a 1v1 fighting game as a new player. You are going to win more often in Overwatch initially because you will get help from your teammates. That may not matter to FGC hardcore types, but it helps keep the player base fresh and introduces new players to the game who might become tomorrow's elite players.

The sad thing is Capcom should have known how important mainstream/casual players were to their bottom line better than anyone. After all Mortal Kombat sure seems to. Fwiw SFV is rumored to have moved 1.5 million total copies and MKX moved 5 million. SFV might be the "better" fighter in a high level technical sense, but I have a lot more faith in the future of Mortal Kombat atm which seems to understand their market better.

I'm sure the "FGC" elements of the Street Fighter community are there for the long haul. It's the casual scrubs like me who still haven't bought SFV that Capcom should worry about.

Poor Capcom. They're rapidly running out of feet to shoot.

Everyone freaked out about this exact thing when League of Legends was getting super huge, and what did that get us? Fanatiq and Marn went "pro" for a bit, then ended up worming their way back into FGC stuff anyway. I think Arturo just forgot that people that play fighting games usually also enjoy other video games, and Overwatch is the hottest video game out right now.

Missing the May update window was definitely terrible timing on Capcom's part but I think it is more Capcom dragging Street Fighter V down than any direct competition.

Killer Instinct is probably the most direct competition since they are hitting their content schedules and the game is very well received but it is not available on PS4 and the property is not as well regarded in the main fighting circles so that is keeping it from totally eating Capcom's lunch.

This. Crapcom released a half-assed, half finished game and have resorted to using their own customer base as free beta testers. That's something I'd expect from EA. Fuck Crapcom.

Are mobile games killing Streetfighter V :P

remember Dimps was the developer of SF4 not Capcom.

Street Fighter is killing the Street Fighter community

should street fighter v talk?