Street Fighter 6 has so much content because of Street Fighter 5's missteps but the developers worried it still wouldn't be enough

There's a lot of things you can certainly say about Street Fighter 6 now, but it lacking content isn't really one of them, which was a breath of fresh air compared to Capcom's other recent fighting games.

Japanese publication Inside-Games recently had the chance to interview SF6 Director Takayuki Nakayama and Producer Shuhei Matsumoto where they discuss how the shadow of Street Fighter 5's mistakes loomed over their heads for SF6 and how they worried there still wouldn't be enough content to make up for it.

Inside-Games: It feels like an absolute ton of work has been put into the parts of Street Fighter 6 that aren't just the actual fights themselves. I'd like to ask you, Matsumoto, as a producer, how has this felt for you?

Producer Matsumoto: I'd say that "fun" or "interesting" are good words to represent it. I don't think adding more functions and features is a bad thing. Actually I felt rather positive, "Oh, we can do this too" and it made me happy.

Director Nakayama: We might be quite unique in that regard. A producer and director being so friendly with each other, and on top of that, Matsumoto really loves Street Fighter. So we realized in the office that "If it makes Matsumoto happy, it will make our customers happy", and that was our approach for a lot of what we did.

Producer Matsumoto: For me as a producer, when I do explanations, presentations or even just social media posts I want to express things that made me think "Hey, that's fun" or "Oh, this is really user friendly", so having the development team be so invested in doing those same things is something I'm very thankful for. Nakayama himself and a lot of the development staff would come up to me regularly and say "Today, we changed this part into this other thing" on very specific details.

Inside-Games: So there's a lot of unity in the staff, then. Honestly, there's such a high volume of content in Street Fighter 6, I can't even get to it all... !

Director Nakayama: All of that is because we felt that we troubled our playerbase a lot with having too little content in the past. I only joined Street Fighter 5 part way through in a supporting role, but throughout all of Street Fighter 6's development while adding content we kept being afraid that it still might not be enough.

Producer Matsumoto: That's right, we actually said that every day.

Director Nakayama: Those feelings really showed when we added Arcade Mode during the latter half of Street Fighter 5. We really disappointed a lot of users back then and even as someone who only joined Street Fighter 5 part way through, it was very painful for several years. That's why with Street Fighter 6 we kept working hard with the locked intention of making sure that we'll please our fans this time, which led to this incredible volume of content.

Although we now see the final product, it's interesting to hear how those on the inside and at the top of the command had reservations about whether what they're doing would be enough.

It took Street Fighter 5 like five months just to get its cinematic story mode and two full years just to get an arcade mode.

Those scars cut deep for fans of the series, and it's nice to hear that those on the team felt that too even though it probably put a lot more pressure on their shoulders.

Like they mentioned, Nakayama and Matsumoto weren't there until SF5 had already been out and "done", but it makes us wonder an alternate universe where they were leading the team from the very beginning.

While it's great to have access to the Battle Hub, World Tour, Extreme Battle, Arcade Mode and more, we're very interested to see if that fervor from SF5 will mean they'll continue to add more modes in the future too.

There's of course going to be the updates to World Tour with the new DLC characters, but we hope to see that creative spark and push continue to give players more reasons to come back years down the road besides just those new fighters.

We're not sure what sorts of modes those could be at this point, but the SF6 team has shown they can think outside the box for what constitutes a fighting game package in 2023.

There's more details of interest that came out of this interview with Inside-Games including the fact Capcom is only looking to provide major updates to SF6 once a year, and they're not going to reset our online rankings like previously thought.

Also, the way they view and rank a character's strength internally apparently can be "totally" different than many of the players.

Big shoutouts to our own Nicholas "MajinTenshinhan" Taylor for providing the translations to make this story possible.