Capcom celebrates the 8th anniversary of Street Fighter V by saying sorry for Street Fighter V

Street Fighter character Chun-Li
(Image credit: Capcom)

It's been eight years since Street Fighter V first appeared on the scene, and to celebrate the big birthday Capcom took to Twitter to say thanks for sticking with it—and, y'know, sorry for the whole thing.

Street Fighter V has a "mostly positive" user rating on Steam and a respectable 77 aggregate score on Metacritic, so it's easy to forget that it was not exactly in fighting shape at launch. We found the underlying game quite good for experienced players but "miserably light on content," and "simply abysmal" for newcomers to the series. Server issues (which Capcom also apologized for) and rage quitters were big problems too. 

It was all eventually sorted out but those early days were not great, and Capcom has not forgotten.

"From the beginning to the middle of the release, there were network issues, lack of content, etc," the StreetfighterJA account tweeted (via RPS). "We are truly sorry for the content that did not meet the expectations of many of you.

"From the middle to the end of the game, the Street Fighter V development team did a lot of self-reflection and worked hard to resolve the issues as much as possible."

(Image credit: StreetfighterJA (Twitter))

Of course, the ending was happy: Fixes were made, more characters and content were added, and player counts went up "significantly" after the launch of season 4. Lessons learned from Street Fighter V were applied to Street Fighter 6, and it showed: We said in our 89% review that the newest game in the series is "one of the best fighting games we've seen in the last decade," and it was a big sales hit too.

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.