Street Fighter 6's Director and Producer share their feelings about launching the game and its strong reception a month after release

Street Fighter 6 is one of the best reviewed fighting games of all time and Capcom's most well received since Street Fighter 4 thanks to the dedicated development staff and those leading its vision.

Japanese publication Inside-Games recently conducted an interview with SF6 Director Takayuki Nakayama and Producer Shuhei Matsumoto where they shared their feelings about the launch and the game's reception one month out, which we've translated into English.

Inside-Games: Street Fighter 6 has managed to pull in people who weren't playing fighting games and shown an incredible level of hype around it. Now, one month after release, please give us your honest feelings on achieving this feat (This interview was conducted on July 5th)

Producer Shuhei Matsumoto: We've just been riding the wave so the feeling is "Huh, it's been a month already?", honestly. That feeling of "We finally hit release date" has never really hit, we've just been pushing forward with full fervor, in a good way.

Director Takayuki Nakayama: I feel the same. Since 2018 we were constantly working on this game with our end goal being the release date, but there's still a lot to do to keep the game's reputation up. With that said, we're very grateful that so many people are playing and enjoying it.

Inside-Games: After only a few days, the game had over a million players and even on Steam's concurrent player rankings you beat records with high marginals. These numbers show that the game is definitely very popular.

Director Nakayama: Honestly, compared to our previous game Street Fighter 5, this game has several times more players gathered. Street Fighter 6 seems to have been a trigger for a lot of people to feel "Maybe I should try out fighting games". I also go into the Battle Hub when I get home after work and I just watch the flourishing lobby while smiling.

Producer Matsumoto: When looking at something like that, the feelings of "Man, we really did sell well huh" and "I'm so happy everyone's enjoying it" start welling up.

Inside-Games: At the same time, people watching fighting games and enjoying them that way has increased as well. Especially back on the 25th of June when the CR Cup was held with influencers and V-Tubers, bringing an entirely different kind of fans into the mix became a huge buzz. How do you feel about this movement, as developers?

Producer Matsumoto: We're unbelievably grateful. It was very fun to watch. It was moving, it made you want to cheer for them and it was a wonderful event filled to the brim with all of the positive human emotions.

Director Nakayama: Since 2 years ago, I always said "I'd like to have an event like this". Seeing that happen as soon as only 3 weeks after Street Fighter 6's release felt very good.

Producer Matsumoto: We really felt the potential of how many more people there are out there who can enjoy fighting games and Street Fighter itself. Seeing that hype build really vindicated us in feeling that our approach with this game was correct.

Inside-Games: It was a fantastic event where even the pro gamer Daigo Umehara got to be exposed to a whole new audience. Even after the CR Cup, a lot of popular streamers are still enjoying Street Fighter 6.

Director Nakayama: We're very happy that the Modern Controls and single player World Tour mode which we put in to lower the bar of entry for fighting games have been accepted so well.

While it is nice to hear that the duo steering the Street Fighter ship is finally getting to see the fruits of their five years of labor pay off, it's not surprising it hasn't fully sunken in for them at the time of the interview.

Although the game is out, Nakayama and Matsumoto are still extremely busy flying around the world on a near-weekly basis to promote SF6 while also presumably still helming the game's development post-launch with more updates and content.

They rightfully seem to feel pretty vindicated with their direction for the game and their emphasis on World Tour and Modern controls to get more people in the door though it still remains to be seen how much that will stick in the coming months and years ahead.

The massive success of the CR Cup is interesting to see them bring up, considering the V-Tuber and non-FGC eSports competitor event managed to break stream viewer records for the genre.

We got to see something similar for the West this past weekend with the AT&T Annihilator Cup returning with streamers like Emiru and Lirik, which was made much more entertaining than the Street Fighter 5 version last year since they could use the Modern controls.

Nakayama and Matsumoto had a ton to say about SF6 in this interview that we've been covering like how they worked hard to get as much content into the game as possible to try making up for the mistakes of SF5 but still worried it wouldn't be enough for fans.

This is also where they confirmed Capcom only plans to release one major update for SF6 per year to address big balance and system changes and how they're not going to reset online ranks like previously suggested.

They also relayed the anecdote of how their internal views on character strength often totally differs from top players and how they thought Alex was apparently super strong in SF5.

Street Fighter 6 has a massive week ahead of it headlining Evo 2023 this weekend as seemingly the largest fighting game bracket ever, so it'll be very interesting to see it play out and what's coming next.

This article was possible thanks to the transitions provided by our own Nicholas "MajinTenshinhan" Taylor.