Street Fighter 6 has only gotten better with age, and the best is yet to come

It’s been just under three years since Street Fighter 6 launched, and while we’ve seen competitors come and go, one thing is crystal clear: Capcom is in a league of its own. When I reviewed the game back in 2023, it was obvious that the developer had achieved something special, but little did I know that the best was yet to come.

It’s incredibly difficult to launch a fighting game these days; just look at what happened earlier this year with Riot’s 2XKO and the layoffs that took place after its disappointing launch. As Highguard, Marathon, and myriad other live service games prove, it’s difficult to keep an audience engaged in 2026, even if you come out of the blocks firing on all cylinders. Just ask Tekken 8 fans how they feel about the game since it launched, and you’ll see how quickly sentiment can shift.

Fighting games are in such a niche that outsiders might look at Steam concurrent user numbers hovering under 10,000 and assume Street Fighter 6 is struggling – these are the types of numbers we saw for Tekken 7 and SF5 last generation. While that was acceptable at the time, SF6 is in an entirely different league, reaching a new peak of 72,000 with the launch of Alex.

Alex isn’t the only reason why so many people have flocked back to the game; there was also the balance update that tweaked every character on the SF6 roster. Sure, some of us were hoping for something more substantial from this update to knock Mai off her pedestal, but as we’ve seen from the lackluster Tekken 8 Season 3 update, things could definitely be worse. And to be fair to Capcom, the meta is in a very healthy spot, with more than half of the cast being represented at the highest level.

Capcom has prioritized quality over quantity with SF6 in almost every area, releasing only four new characters every year. Every time a character drops, the devs try to explore new mechanics of the Drive system to make each fighter more interesting. The Year 3 Character Pass is the best example of this to date, with C. Viper’s jump cancel abilities utilizing the Drive Gauge in ways that no other fighter in the game does.

The only consistent content drops are for World Tour, a mode that I haven’t touched since I reviewed the game, but it’s clear that a large portion of the community is still heavily invested in it. It goes to show that Capcom understands that SF6’s audience isn’t entirely composed of players like myself who only care about fighting against other people; it’s going above and beyond to cater to everyone.

And as someone who has played SF6 every week since it launched, it’s painfully obvious that the game has the potential to reach new heights. Capcom’s focus on only releasing high-quality content has meant that there have been gaps of up to five months between new character releases, which feels almost incomprehensible given the game’s popularity. It’s also criminally slow dropping new costumes for existing characters, especially compared to SF5 which had a monthly cadence of different outfits, even if most of them were for Chun-Li…

Let’s not forget the disastrous pay-per-view Capcom Cup debacle, which saw the culmination of a year’s worth of tournaments locked behind a paywall for the first time. For an event with over $1,000,000 in prize money, I know people who play SF6 regularly who didn’t even know this tournament even took place. Capcom’s esports department isn’t working alongside the devs, and with no tie-ins to the main game, it’s easy to see how one of the biggest tournaments went under the radar for most people.

Despite these shortcomings, I’m confident in declaring that SF6 is the best Street Fighter game ever made, and that’s coming from someone who spent years playing Third Strike during Capcom’s dark age in the early 2000s. Even if the developer continues to produce content at this infuriatingly slow pace, this game will still go down in history as one of the greats. My only hope is that it takes advantage of this momentum and starts ramping up the pace of the content drops, then we’ll see just how big the series can become.