How dare Capcom support the community that has been playing their game for 5 years with new content! I don't see any problem with this new expansion, adding a total 5 new characters while totally rebalancing the existing 39 characters? Sure you may say that 4 of those new characters are from SFxT, but that game plays a LOT differently than SF4 so there is still work that needs to be done and it's not JUST a copy/paste job.

But oh well, I guess I'm just a sheep and an idiot for being excited for DLC that freshens up one of the games I spend the most time with.

If it keeps the players seriously interested and necessarily prolongs Street Fighter IV's life cycle... In a way this can this be the generations version of the Street Fighter II games in which the older folks have grown up and loved. I will buy it since it's still enjoyable to play and watch.

You sound a bit aggressive and cynical over the issue... Sure the time people will stop wanting to pay for something over and over again might come but there is something to necessarily consider at this point: People want to play more Street Fighter IV. It's exploitative but not in the common negative context. Capcom is understanding the strong competitive output shown all over the world.

Capcom could have just said AE2012 is the final one but the players are saying different. Players want more crap, they want Yang's crossup jump medium kick back, they want Cammy to feel less damaging when she does mixups, etc, etc etc. If people didn't want more, they wouldn't be talking about adjustments to characters and adding more on places like Capcom Unity, Shoryuken, etc all the time.

At the end, Capcom doesn't seem exploitative but are more or less submissive to players. While you can enjoy whatever game you like, players will be playing Ultra with the likely benefit of understanding the new matchup knowledge between every character, going to local tournaments and gaining new friends there and maybe getting hype in Las Vegas next to thousands of others to see who will be the next champion at EVO. I forgot to add having fun.

Also you mentioned UMVC3... It applies to the same for Marvel, Guilty Gear and previously did for KOF. People want to play more. WHEN'S MARVEL?!

Why did I even read this?

At 15 bucks per DLC (if you have the original disc and just want to keep up) and being the 5th time they did this thats 5*15 = 75 bucks spread out the 4 years it has been since original release. Or at any time if you lost old disc, never got into it til now or something, you can jump in for 40 bucks everything updated. Tell me again how its exploitative, or just at the very least not let your blind rage from telling lies to make yourself feel better.

Fuck yes I'm getting this. A rather spend 15 bucks every year and half to update SF then get hit with 60 bucks every year with a new COD and Madden. BTW, all the fans wanted this. You know there is this little thing called rebalancing that does only cater to the hardcore audience but it's also why the game is still alive in the hardcore circles running in tournaments to this day. Rehash and rubber stamping a new release? If Capcom really did that then the hardcore fans would start going away. You have to understand why the hardcore are still there and what they wanted. So every time they just add in new characters, they have to think about how each move affects everything else. The end result are a bunch of small changes to its ever growing cast, and it only really takes one misbalance to kill the game. Just one thing to push the game to be dominated by one character/strat. Then even the hardcore audience would leave the game. No more demand, and certainly no Sf5 in the next year for the extra milk money you like to call it.

Also, Capcom said it themselves, as much as there is hype every year at Evo and the FGC is growing, fighting games just aren't selling the same numbers as an FPS is, so Capcom themselves don't really put a super high budget to the Street Fighter team. This results in having DLCs every year as updates as opposed to having a full new game.

If you have the mentality of beating and completing a game, then you probably wouldn't enjoy fighting games to begin with. Fighting games is not about beating the end boss and saying you got some hard achievement out of it. Fighting games, at its core is always going to be about playing against another person. The tactics that worked well in SF4 does not in the latest version, which is why its a different game. The DLC for say Fallout may give me a whole new region to play with, but nothing changes for the weapons and characters that was in the core game. When a new DLC for SF is released, the core characters are changed, making a new game; since guess what, even if they straight up made SF5 instead of an update, you can bet its going to have RYu and KEn in it, and they will be throwing fireballs.

Street Fighter 4 with different adjectives, that's capcom for you. Even though they made some games that I love. The company as a whole can be shady at times, but who knows what happens behind close doors.

As hilarious as this is, especially since they claimed that Arcade Edition would be the last iteration of Street Fighter IV, I'm excited for this. I had always wished that those characters had gone to this game instead of Street Fighter × Tekken (both is better, of course). This is actual true DLC made after the fact (even if it's repurposed from another game) and not disc-locked content. Plus, if you skipped AE you get that, and this new content for $15. Sounds solid to me!

If you're still playing SFIV, then this is incredibly exciting news, and an amazing value. If you aren't playing SFIV any more, then what the fuck do you care?

Guess what, the reason Capcom fighting games are the most successful is because they are intelligently designed, incredibly balanced, and are the best in the genre at being easy to learn but difficult to master. Even SFxT, which was unfortunately maligned by the DLC fiasco and poor initial tuning, has become one of the most strategically sophisticated fighting games out there.

There are fighting game players, and people that play fighting games. If you don't get it, you probably never will.

Yup. I flat out refuse to buy any further Capcom fighting games. Fuck them.

Releasing 29 versions back in the days of arcade cabinets was fine because the financial burden was on the arcade owner. Typically a new machine would result in better business because of people wanting to play it. Those days are gone, and in typical Japanese developer fashion they simply don't get it. I wonder what the math is on all of the different versions of SFIV, but I'm guessing that for all the games, updates, and DLC it would be at least 200 dollars. For a fucking game. It's exploitative.

I get them wanting to breath new life into a game. I get the fans asking for it. But there comes a time when you stop coming hat in hand continually asking for more money from the people that made you what you are to begin with. The characters are ripped directly from SFxT. The extra stages are ripped directly from SFxT. The balance tweaks should have been done as an update months if not years ago instead of paid DLC. When you come out with three previous console versions, one that was 40 bucks and completely nullified a 60 dollar game, there comes a point where you should give back. And they did it again with UMvC3 after SSFIVAEHDTESDVoDAIDS.I get them being a business but they're exploiting people. In no world is this acceptable behavior for any company. If EA did what they're doing, which they've done, they'd be fucking crucified. It's a sick double standard.Again. Fuck Capcom.

I bet this is the last for Street Fighter IV, and while I've been really happy with it over the years, I get the feeling this is the last update they're making to tide people over until Street Fighter V on next gen consoles.

And coming right off of EVO, I still have very fond feelings for SFIV and appreciate getting more out of it. Until Street Fighter V is released, I can handle a few updates like this. If it can keep mixing things up for big fighting tournaments like EVO, I'm excited.

They aren't going to do anything new until the new consoles have been out for awhile. This allows them to continue to give fighting fans something in the meantime. My money is on the fact that the 5th character will be a big tease for whatever their working on for next-gen consoles.

Also, saying that the genre only has room for one fighting game is especially foolish coming off of Evo.

not really sure if recycled characters from their recent bombed fighting game and tweaked frame data would be enough to warrant a 15$ add-on or 40$ disc

It's a game that quite a large number of people still love passionately (judging from the combined 400k viewers on the 2 EVO streams I just saw). I don't begrudge Capcom giving them more of what they've been begging for. They might be getting exploited on some level, but so what? They full well know it at this point. Don't hate. I'm excited for it.

Maybe it's not directly comparable, but I have to say I feel the same way about strategy gaming and Starcraft II. One franchise pretty much totally dominates the genre as a competitive event, and they said outright they would expand their base product twice. Blizzard recognized their dominant position ahead of time, which is smart from their perspective, but it's kind of a bummer for people who play anything else.

Personally I gave up on SFIV after Super.

Technically, this is the 5th iteration of Street Fighter IV if you count the original arcade version that only had 17 characters. That being said, I don't think this would've been made had Street Fighter x Tekken not bombed with the fighting game community as it has. I believe that 2013 update fixed a lot of the problems people had with it, but it was still given the shaft this year so I don't think its future is bright.

Street Fighter IV is something that works, has been well-received by the fighting game community at large and is still dynamic enough to the point where a Gen player took the championship this year. GEN. That would've been unthinkable in 2009. SFIV still has some legs, give it that credit. Am I going to get it? Not sure, haven't played Street Fighter seriously since Arcade Edition came out and I was continually wrecked by Yun players. But an update like this assures at the very least that the game won't be stale for those who care, at least for another few years. I imagine this is the last one until a next gen Street Fighter V is released.

This update seems mainly aimed at the SF heads, not the people marginally interested. I don't see anything wrong with that and it keeps the competive scene fresh.

also its attempting to fix some things inherently wrong with the system ie unblockable setups

i'm excited

People begged Capcom for this, It's what the people want. Why you gotta hate.

The only game that comes close to the tournament popularity is Marvel VS Capcom 3, a noisy button masher with an equally noisy, obnoxious fanbase.

I don't play Marvel but that is kind of a mean thing to say. : /

Also, I feel that Capcom would be better off if they went the TF2 route and made the game F2P, updates and all. Then make bank with cosmetics and such. I mean, it's nice that they are supporting their game this fervently, but making people pay for the updates kinda puts off the more casual section of the fanbase. If you are hardcore about SF4, you would most probably get your money's worth out of these updates though.

Eh, at least it's better than BlazBlue and its iterations (coming up to four already!!) that are exclusively on discs.

I guess I can see that, but having been around for the SFII saturation and what it did to the genre in the late 90s, I was really hoping for Capcom to have moved on to a proper SFV instead of repeating the pattern from the 90s.

And I imagine wanting to forget that SFxT exists has as much to do with the "DLC" controversy as it does the lukewarm reception (I must admit, I find "Street Fighter X Timeout" to be quite a funny name for it).

If they are offering the characters as DLC or the DLC is an update to the core game, then what is the problem?

I love that fighting games don't have annual releases. I would be more pissed off if Street Fighter came out every 1-2 years as a full $60 product. They re-release the game in order to make it more available/appealing to people who did not buy the prior version. I may be mistaken, but the only version you needed to re-purchase was Super SF4 because they fucked the DLC stuff up in the core SF4 game.

This is how you have to support a game that has a professional following. By the time all is said and done I will have bought the very first edition and the very last. Can't wait. I see where you're coming from but to casual fans any one of those releases on their own would be enough.

Fuck yeah I'm getting this. As someone who plays the game and watches the competitive scene, new balance changes and content is always nice to have. It kinda is a bummer that the new characters (except the 5th one) and supposedly the new stages are being copy and pasted from Street Fighter X Tekken. Still, I would rather have that content in SF4 because that is the better game. Seems like Capcom kinda wants to ignore the fact that SFxT exists because most people find it boring (I like it personally.) Plus new modes will be nice as well. Sure this isn't for everybody and mostly the fans, but it's still nice to have.