{"id":90945,"date":"2026-10-09T11:42:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T15:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/?p=90945"},"modified":"2026-10-09T12:37:52","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T16:37:52","slug":"street-fighter-was-on-deaths-door-and-its-players-werent-getting-any-younger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/?p=90945","title":{"rendered":"Street Fighter Was On Death\u2019s Door, And Its Players Weren\u2019t Getting Any Younger"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Street Fighter 5 launched in 2016 in rough shape, and if things hadn&#8217;t changed, the classic fighting game franchise might have been dead and buried by 2026. That&#8217;s according to Street Fighter 6 producer Shuhei Matsumoto and game director Takayuki Nakayama, who recently spoke about how Capcom&#8217;s signature fighting game franchise was knocking on death&#8217;s door at one point, before a turnaround strategy reenergized it for a new generation of digital fisticuffs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Following Capcom veteran Yoshinoro Ono&#8217;s exit from the company in 2020, Matsumoto and Nakayama started work on a new Street Fighter game that could appeal to both the existing&#8211;and aging&#8211;player base while attracting new blood to the series. &#8220;When the two of us were talking during Street Fighter 5, we realized that if we didn&#8217;t do something about Street Fighter, the Street Fighter IP would probably die in 10 years. It was critical. So, we had to make it a game where people would get to know it all over again and play it again,&#8221; Matsumoto said in an interview with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=y2DSNf_1TDw\">Karin Ohira<\/a>\u00a0(via\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ign.com\/articles\/street-fighter-6-producer-reveals-how-he-helped-save-capcoms-iconic-fighting-game-franchise-from-dying\">IGN<\/a>). &#8220;At that time, the player base for Street Fighter\u00a05 was roughly 35 to 45 years old. In 10 years, these people will be 60. It\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Street Fighter 5 launched in 2016 in rough shape, and if things hadn&#8217;t changed, the classic fighting game franchise might have been dead and buried by 2026. That&#8217;s according to Street Fighter 6 producer Shuhei Matsumoto and game director Takayuki Nakayama, who recently spoke about how Capcom&#8217;s signature fighting game franchise was knocking on death&#8217;s&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":90947,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-external"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90945"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90945"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90948,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90945\/revisions\/90948"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/90947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}