Street Fighter 6 players left depressed as yet another battle pass is announced, while character costumes are nowhere to be found

Street Fighter 6 has just had yet another battle pass announced for it as it enters the 2025 season, filled with cosmetics for player avatars, stickers, and online challenger portraits. However for Street Fighter 6 fans who've been fiending for new costumes for the main cast, the announcement has gone down terribly.

If you take a look at the battle pass trailer on YouTube or Twitter, you'll be confronted with hundreds of negative comments and reactions. The pass has been refered to as lame, and abysmal dogshit by some on social media, whereas the YouTube comments can be summed up nicely by one misterbranches4362, who wrote "I'd rather have nothing. Thank you".

Okay, so how did we get here, and why are people so dissapointed? Well, Street Fighter 6 is Capcom's first proper crack at a modern live service title. It's not free-to-play, but it has been supported by various post-launch battle passes alongside the expected output of new characters and character costumes. The problem is, new characters and new costumes for the whole cast aren't coming out at a pace players expect, while avatar costumes and smaller cosmetics like stickers etc appear to be the priority.

While we don't know just how popular avatar battles are, nor the percentile split between the players who hop into an avatar lobby to play online versus those who just boot up ranked and demote at 3AM, it is assumed that at this point in the game's life cycle those playing the game are dedicated, dare I say hardcore players. These types of players aren't hashing it out in avatar battles, instead they're labbing combos for hours on regular Street Fighter characters like Rashid and Ryu. Combos that they're sure to drop at their local tournament regardless of how flashy their in-game avatar looks.

Here's some extra context. The last time we got character costumes in Street Fighter 6 - the stuff these outraged players want - was in December 2023 with the Outfit 3 pack. This provided new costumes for the launch roster, not any DLC characters. An Outfit 3 pack for the first wave of DLC characters was dropped back in May. That means for the majority of characters, there have been no cosmetics on sale that you'll see on your character, during regular matches, for over a year. Compare that to Street Fighter 5, which had loads of new costumes tied to the Capcom Pro Tour, and you can see why some players who've been around for a while are a a tad frustrated.

So there's the controversy in a nutshell. The only large looming question left is, why has Capcom taken this approach to post-game support? The developer, which has long struggled to embrace the live service model comfortably, has clearly identified that the game needs consistant post-launch support, but has chosen cosmetics like Avatar clothing and stickers to do so. Even in collaboration events, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover, we got Avatar stuff.

We don't know the internal data Capcom is working with, maybe there is this silent majority of players who love buying avatar cosmetics, grab every battle pass, and mess around in the in-game arcade lobby all day. Maybe there's real appetite for this stuff, but as of right now, we're not seeing evidence of that online. Perhaps, instead, it's cheaper to create this sort of cosmetic? Rather than remodel an entire character, it could be quicker and cheaper to create clothing for the Avatar rig. Maybe Japan, a country in which Street Fighter 6 remains super popular (in fact, it may even be growing in popularity) is down bad for dressing up freaky human-esque monster men? All possible, but nothing anyone can prove at this point.

Ultimately it's something that Capcom will have to confront, and if nothing changes, a reality that Street Fighter 6 players will have to come to terms with. The wildest thing about this whole situation is that there's a clear, powerful voice coming from players who claim they want to spend money on new costumes. It could be that online demand doesn't translate to real sales, but nonetheless it's an interesting outrage to watch from afar, and a case study for other fighting game developers looking to embrace live service.