We liked Street Fighter 5 quite a bit, but there's no denying that it was lacking in some pretty meaningful ways. It shipped without an arcade mode, a story mode, or even a best-of-three versus mode against the CPU, absences at the heart of the many negative user reviews on Steam. That hopefully won't happen again in the future, however, or at least not as much, as Capcom said in its 2016 financial results briefing (via GameSpot) that it will put a priority on “completeness” in future releases, rather than a bloody-minded commitment to schedules.
“For games to be hits at the global level they must be high quality. To this end, as a result of juding it necessary to spent a little more time on the development and operation of titles that are not yet up to that standard, we have revised the development periods for a small number of titles,” Capcom wrote. “Rather than absolutely holding to sales periods or development deadlines, in the pursuit of quality that wholly satisfies our users we will carry out development that prioritizes completeness even if it requires some scheduling adjustments.”
Street Fighter 5 is only mentioned in the summary as the means through which Capcom “will aim to establish a place within the fighting game genre for esports,” but as IB Times revealed earlier this month, it sold only 1.4 million copies in its first month-and-a-half of release, well short of the two million units targeted in Capcom's FY2016 third quarter report—a good reason for second thoughts about how things are being done.
