For its eighth anniversary, Capcom admits it messed up Street Fighter 5's launch

Street Fighter 5 was infamously poorly received by fans at launch, and to commemorate its eighth anniversary, Capcom has admitted to its mistakes.

It's easy to forget that with how good Street Fighter 6 is, once upon a time Capcom wasn't in the fighting game community's good books because of Street Fighter 5. The at the time highly anticipated sequel was a bit of a let down for many fans of the series, in particular because of technical issues and a general lack of content. It eventually turned things around more-or-less, but it certainly put a sour note for many fans. The game hit its eighth anniversary over the weekend, and to mark that occasion, the official Japanese Street Fighter Twitter account didn't do a simple "happy birthday" kind of message, but actually fully acknowledged the mistakes that were made.

"Street Fighter celebrates its 8th anniversary. The initial phases of release betrayed players’ expectations in many ways, including network issues and a lack of content," reads the tweet, as translated by Automaton. "This is something we are truly sorry for. After much reflection, the Street Fighter 5 development team worked hard to tackle all issues, and the final game had 45 playable characters, as well as the addition of the Battle System, V-Skill, V-Trigger II and V-Shift.

"Thanks to that, the number of Street Fighter 5 players grew greatly from Season 4 onwards. We still remember the happiness we felt at the time, and even now, hundreds of thousands of players continue to play Street Fighter 5, which makes us very happy! And above all, we were able to utilise everything we learned from the experience and apply it to Street Fighter 6. We can feel the progress we made together with all of you over these past 8 years. Thank you so much!"

Street Fighter 5 might not have started as the game that many wanted, but at least 6 is in a strong position going forward - and of course, you can expect to see some high-tier play at Evo later this year, alongside some of the other biggest fighting games around.