If Street Fighter III is my favorite son, then Street Fighter V is the second oldest who does very well and is almost as good as his older brother. Messed up genealogy aside, Street Fighter V has a superb fighting system which addresses a lot of flaws that I found in Street Fighter IV. In a lot of ways, it feels like the true successor to IV’s legacy and ready for another half decade of success. But in a lot of ways, it represents a lot of flaws of Capcom as a company and ends up stumbling and becoming one of the most disappointing experiences that I have played in years. From shady business models to a messy server with little updates, the game shows that while Capcom as a company tries to step ahead, it also falls behind on the times in a growing competitive market.

In 2008, Yoshiniro Ono and a small team at Dimps released Street Fighter IV after a much disputed history with Capcom on whether Street Fighter should continue or remain a legacy series. What followed was a boom in the fighting game market, with Street Fighter IV breaking expectations and the home console port becoming one of the fastest selling games of 2009. Street Fighter V launched in 2016 with surrounding excitement over the next evolution of the much lauded series. What followed were middling reviews and fans expressing disappointment yet hope for the game’s growth. The game had a solid foundation, but what was missing was an infrastructure to support such a sharp and focused engine.

When looking at Street Fighter V, the first thought that people may have is that it needed more development time. Most of the menus were greyed out with a message promising its arrival in a future update. The roster was noticeably skimpy, with 16 character at launch compared to Street Fighter IV’s 25 characters. While some may argue that rosters should not be analyzed by simple numbers and that maybe it was in part to make balancing easier, I felt rather unsure after Capcom announced prior to launch that they are releasing 6 new characters throughout 2016, confirming my thoughts that Capcom simply did not have the time and resources to make more characters. In a way, it’s underwhelming as a fan because Street Fighter has a huge legacy of characters that were untapped, from Alpha to Street Fighter III, and I felt that the potential was lost in delivering a well-rounded cast for players to experiment with. As a fighting game player, my first action with a new fighter is circling the characters I’m interested in and with such a low character count, it’s simply underwhelming when there aren’t too many characters to experiment with. Because of the DLC, a new character dropping is exciting at first, but not over the character itself rather the prospect of simply being able to try new content over a character I may not have even bothered with if it were in the roster prior to release.

But why can NetherRealm release the Kombat Packs with high praise and Killer Instinct get away with the same model of release with seasons? NetherRealm released a complete fighting game with the Kombat Pack looking to delivering extra content for the fans clamoring for more while Street Fighter V’s character releases are because the game is short on content and Capcom needs to put out more before fan interest is lost. KI was released as $20 seasons that had a plethora of content added over time. Paying $20 for Killer Instinct was feasible because the game had limited time for development and they used that time to give out free content and characters that eventually rounded out the roster. They also kept updating fans with dates and modes added over time to make it a complete fighter. By Season 3, Killer Instinct had a story, all of the modes that are standard in fighters, and a complete roster all for $60, the standard price of a full game. At $60 for Street Fighter V, players got a small roster with the promise of more characters through free to play or $30 for a season pass and empty promises.

What makes the roster more frustrating is them being locked behind the in game currency. While it is rather appealing (and even noble at first) to be able to not have to pay money to pay for new content, the business model makes itself apparent that it borrows ideas from other games with similar pay to play models without the benefits. Longtime players get to experience the new content because they build up currency through dailies and in game challenges, allowing Capcom to continue supporting the growing community with more content being developed. Because Capcom has remained silent on the implementation of dailies, the only way to earn Fight Money is through story prologues, combo trials, and survival mode. Survival mode is the way to earn the most currency, but the game shows its rushed colors when the AI is very passive and is more or less a standing punching bag while in later matches the AI predicts throws and uppercuts at perfect consistency. Because of the AI reading your inputs and the game’s health regeneration percentage running on RNG, there are many times when you face the final stage at low health and lose. Losing means you get nothing from your efforts and the failed retries add to the frustration but has the player incentivizing to playing it to earn the money and costumes. If a game has the player reluctantly playing a repetitive mode to be able to access content, there is a large issue in how it is structured and should be made in a way that the player has fun while earning the extra content. I personally did not enjoy the survival mode at all, but being that it was the only way to actually earn Fight Money to buy characters, it kept me playing.

The prospect of earning currency would be feasible if playing meant that all of the non-premium content would be accessible. However, with the way that the game is set up, the player has a hard time affording all of the characters, either forcing the player to pick which characters they would rather play or buy the convenient Season Pass. The game’s currency offering starts plateauing once they finish the story prologues and story mode. This leaves the player with the DLC prologues (that they need to buy), survival mode, or grinding Fight Money by winning online (only 50 Fight Money a win though). The game’s structure appears are free to play, but because of how hard it is to earn more money, the game conveniently shows the Season Pass as a way to bypass the grinding. Even then, the Season Pass only exists for characters and no stages, premium costumes, or extra content can be redeemed with it. Street Fighter V follows my personal fear of the game nickel and diming the dedicated fan through its Season Passes and premium content with overpriced DLC. Remember how Street Fighter IV offered 5 costumes for $4 in a pack and Street Fighter X Tekken sweetened the deal by allowing players to make their own packs for the same price? Now the costumes cost $4 each, $1 less than what a character costed in the last generation of consoles. In a very discomforting light, Capcom is focusing on making the dedicated take out their wallets with their content. If the issue is not being compensated for their work by not charging, then I would gladly accept this system being dropped in favor of yearly updates like IV to give developers more time to release all of the content at once without fear of crashing the game’s infrastructure. But this current model has the shady business practices of MOBAs without any of the benefits for long time players.

Yes, shady business models are no stranger to Capcom, but the game also lacks its offerings in its complete infrastructure. Ranked battles now follow MOBAs as well, with players progressing with wins and being demoted with losses versus Street Fighter IV’s more lax grading system. Because of this, the player’s rank encourages a stronger competitive streak and may make some determined players rage quit at the prospect of losing. Unfortunately, Capcom did not implement a rage quit system to deal with those who wish to cheat the system and allows players to quit to their desire if they’re not satisfied with a result. While Capcom claimed that they implemented a new system to deal with quitters, it only works for an 80% disconnect rate, meaning players can still quit every now and then when they lose to lower leveled players but accept their losses on high level players. The way the system is created only works on an overall basis instead of case by case and doesn’t seem like a solution but more of a punishment to offenders with unrealistically high win rates. When a player wins, it encourages them to be motivated to continue winning and losses show players where they need to improve. With the lack of a rage quit system, an honest player loses points at defeat and gains nothing at victory, which leaves them continually losing and causing frustration. This either demotivates the player or encourages them to follow the same tactics. As a fighting game community, this lack of punishment is incredibly harmful to the game and needs to be addressed sooner than later.

Even with the frustration of ranked matches, the servers often crash and game data does not save fight results. This becomes worse during updates where the game does not work for days until Capcom responds by fixing the servers yet making something new fail. The game is a structural mess and shows that it was rushed through in time for tournaments yet failing to deliver on any online multiplayer front. This is an issue as the game is lacking in single player, making multiplayer the only selling point. If your game is to be so strongly focused in that regard, it needs to be in top condition to ensure the community to remain, yet Capcom continually fails in delivering a smooth online experience. The amount of apologies that Capcom makes would be more excusable if they weren’t so hasty to patch a solution to refuse modders from accessing Juri and Urien before release, with severe punishments directed towards offenders. This sort of prioritization is understandable for a business to protect its revenue, but after months of a tumultuous experience that was apologized with a free story costume, fans have every right to express disapproval. This disappointment is raised when Capcom is so quiet on concerns and updates and then making their announcements a huge celebration and taken with such a prideful gesture when they state that two characters are being launched at once when all they are doing is following the schedule that they intended.

The big turnaround for the game and Capcom’s intention to alleviate the ongoing concerns for a skimpy package was answered in its story mode after months of anticipation and yet failed to deliver on a lot of aspects ranging from a predictable plot without any of the charm of the characters to glitches that make characters clip and look unnatural. Perhaps the story would not be as hard to accept if it were part of the launched game and not anticipated for months to players looking for more content. It smells of Capcom going through the motions to simply saying, “Good enough,” and releasing the mode that lacks any of the imagination behind the characters and lore. Mortal Kombat understood this by not writing an award winning story, but instead focusing on the absurdities of its universe and the personality of the cast. They threw in cameos of other characters from the series legacy as fan service to its audience, while Street Fighter had the Dolls as the only legacy characters. No sign of classics like Sagat, T. Hawk, Makoto, nor Dan and no signs from characters directly involved with past plots like Rose with M. Bison. The mode feels like a representation of Capcom’s laziness with the game and left me even more frustrated with the product.

But where did Capcom go wrong with Street Fighter V? With prior Street Fighters, fans were satisfied with the basic arcade offerings and an online mode, yet people are eager for more with this outing. The answer mostly lies in the evolution of the genre and how practices from years ago are no longer the norm. With Mortal Kombat 9, NetherRealm Studios went out of their way to deliver content, from a lengthy and entertaining story mode to challenge towers and party modes with absurd powers. Mortal Kombat X went a step further and added holiday challenge towers and updated the game on a rather consistent basis, making it a great deal for fighting game and casual fans alike. Blazblue has a full story mode, a completely involved character tutorial, and a joke lore mode that explains its world. Even small releases like Aquapazza have a story mode and extra modes for casual fans to try. Capcom’s mentality is that of an arcade fighter from 1997, having a couple of single player modes and mostly focus on delivering an identical arcade experience.

What was impressive for 1997 is now an expected standard in the market and Capcom can no longer rely on the simple basics and fans really aren’t impressed when a series first for Capcom has long been a standard for other series. Capcom cannot make a story mode that feels rushed and thrown out the door nor have its ‘tutorial mode’ be a video showing the absolute basics of a character with no involvement and in game content. With practices like these, Capcom is alienating its casual fans as well as digging into sales. Capcom has made it apparent that they are targeting the tournament fighter scene, rushing the game in time for the Capcom Pro Tour. However, leaving the casual audience out causes a hit in sales and Street Fighter V has been reported to only selling 1.4 million copies by the end of May 2016 but as of July, Mortal Kombat X has sold 2,62 million on the PlayStation 4 alone. Compare that to the PS3 version of Street Fighter IV selling over 4 million units and it shows that fighting games are not having a loss in popularity, but that fans are no longer satisfied with what is being delivered. This is no longer the 90s and Capcom just can’t expect to make a competent system and call it a day when games like Mortal Kombat have had superb releases and future fighters like Tekken 7 are looking to wow the audiences. Meanwhile Capcom is still trying to fix Street Fighter V with no avail and are showing less interest in keeping the fanbase alive. It’s a competitive market with other companies raising the standard, which should encourage others to aim higher and not settle for making less.

How can Street Fighter V be fixed? There is no panacea for the franchise, but Capcom needs to understand that video games are sometimes approached from a place of passion and the fighting game community so dedicated to the newest releases are created from a love for the game. These games should not be strictly looked at as business models but approached in the aspect of what fans look into when playing a new fighting game. With companies like NetherRealm, Namco, and Arc System Works having successes with their franchises, Capcom should not be the company chugging behind and stumbling with their market. Capcom is the company that revolutionized the genre and resurrected the quiet scene into the powerhouse it is with Street Fighter IV. With IV, the stakes were high and the team was determined to make it the most complete and exciting offering yet, but with V it simply feels like Capcom was aiming for, “Good enough.” They should not be trying to make a release ‘good enough’ but focus on raising the bar for other companies to follow like they have had with each release in Street Fighter. The slogan for Street Fighter V is, “Rise up,” but all I see is the company aiming for slightly around the bar but not trying to go any higher (with the messy servers, I feel that Capcom stumbled into the bar and kept trying to climb that bar before the entire system collapsed). I love Street Fighter and have played almost every release with care. If it takes them dropping the free to play model and evaluating the business decisions to make a better Street Fighter V, I will gladly support the decision. There is a gem of a game hiding in the greasy and unfinished mold of a business model and Capcom needs to find what it takes to keep fans satisfied before it is too late. I hope to see Capcom reevaluate and see their community as fans and not simply potential revenue.