Well Capcom. You’ve gone and done it again!

After all the years of the fighting game community supporting the Capcom Pro Tour and Street Fighter 6, the company had a change of heart. Instead of making the entire show viewable for free as with previous years, Capcom has decided to section off Street Fighter 6’s Top 8 of the Capcom Cup behind a paywall. I do have to mention just the Top 8 is going to be pay-per-view. There are most definitely financial considerations as to why Capcom chose to do this. Still, this hasn’t stopped the fighting game community and even the Street Fighter 6 development team to express shock and outrage regarding this change.

Funny thing, though. This isn’t the first time Capcom made a bonehead move. Nor will it be their last. But with this coming up, this did bring back some flashbacks of some of the other terrible things Capcom had done in the past. And, boy oh boy, there have been a lot of them. So strap in, kiddies! Let’s go check out five other times Capcom committed some major unforced errors!

#1 Street Fighter III‘s initial radical roster revision

Capcom was riding high way back in the ’90s. They were rolling in money thanks to Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha/Zero and all their sub-sequels’ success. But times were changing as other fighting games were starting to muscle in on their territory and these sub-sequels weren’t cutting it anymore. Fans were starting to demand a proper sequel. So, Capcom finally obliged in 1997 when they released Street Fighter III: New Generation. Fans were excited to try out the game… until they saw the ragtag roster the game came with!

To be fair, during the game’s early development, the first version of Street Fighter III (or “Three” per the early arcade cabinets) wasn’t even supposed to be a Street Fighter game. Even so, the initial roster just had a bunch of weirdos! Ryu and Ken weren’t even supposed to be returning but were added later because of how strange the original cast of characters came off!

Seeing these total unknowns take up the majority of Street Fighter III’s roster was just poor decision making. It certainly didn’t help that they all came off as rather ugly! Despite Street Fighter III’s incredibly fluid animations, the character designs were just so uninspired! Slowly but surely, Capcom would make changes Street Fighter III’s roster, eventually including returning characters like Akuma and Chun-Li. The initial cast also got some various tweaks to make their gameplay more expressive, leading some of them, like Dudley and Ibuki, to become new fan favorites. Still, the base roster of new faces really didn’t impress fans and hamstrung Capcom.

#2 “COD-ifying” Resident Evil

In 2005, Capcom successfully reinvigorated the Resident Evil franchise with Resident Evil 4. Instead of pre-rendered locations and exploring, Resident Evil 4 was much more action packed. The horror mostly taking a backseat to twitch gameplay. But Capcom wanted more and it was this kind of thinking that nearly killed the franchise. Instead of trying to improve what they did for Resident Evil 5, Capcom opted to just copy another popular shooter. That game being the best selling game, Call of Duty. This started the franchise’s short-lived transition from “survival horror” to “full fledged COD copycat.” This culminated in the atrocity that is Resident Evil 6.

There’s nothing really wrong with shaking things up a bit. But there’s something wrong when the shake up destroys whatever you’re trying to reinvigorate. With this transition to more action instead of careful exploration and scares, the Resident Evil lost its identity. It lost what made it, well, Resident Evil. In their attempt to try to copy Call of Duty’s massive success, they forgot that the Resident Evil was already a massive success!

Thankfully, Capcom finally reversed course with Resident Evil VII: Biohazard. This returned the franchise back to its horror roots but added a new twist. Instead of playing in a third person viewpoint, the game was played completely in first person. In a way, it was still copying the Call of Duty franchise by switching to this viewpoint. However, Capcom chose the right thing to steal as playing it in this way led to the scary stuff being more in your face. This upped the fear factor and made it a great return to form.

#3 “Americanizing” their franchises

The mid-2000s and early part of 2010 was a very dark time for Capcom for several reasons. But, for right now, I’d like to focus on one particular contributor to Capcom’s decline during this period. That would be them trying to “Americanize” their games. This was due to the Western gaming market being much bigger than the Japanese market. So, it does make sense to start designing games for Westerners. They problem is when you don’t really know what Westerners want. For some reason, the folks at Capcom thought we wanted bland and drab games like DmC: Devil May Cry, the Bionic Commando reboot and *shudder* Final Fight Streetwise.

I guess this does link up to my previous entry with why Capcom chose to ape Call of Duty. And I guess this did happen to a lot of Japanese game developers, chasing after Western audiences and sales. Still, this was a very dark period for Capcom as they were expecting to cash in on this new direction. Instead, Western audiences generally rejected this new direction. Why? Because they loved what they were doing before!

There was really no need to try to adapt their franchises to suit Western tastes because Westerners were already eating their games up! Thanks to this brief and unfortunate change, the Final Fight series essentially died! Bionic Commando had to return to its retro aesthetic to stay relevant. And Devil May Cry just went back to its original look and style to massive success. So, in order to reverse their fortunes, Capcop just reversed their policy of “Americanizing” games, proving they didn’t need to do this in the first place!

#4 The “DLC on disc” situation

It’s sad how downloadable content or DLC has become very common these days. In a way, gamers appreciate it as this does keep a game feel fresh for years to come. We also think it sucks because, in the back of our minds, developers are withholding content from us. Well, Capcom truly went above and beyond when it came to withholding content! Usually, you expect DLC to be, you know, something you have to download. What Capcom did with games like Dragon’s Dogma and Street Fighter X Tekken is put the supposedly “downloadable context” already in the disc you bought! This got everyone upset!

In another bonehead move, Capcom tried to explain how this was beneficial for all consumers! For Dragon’s Dogma, they reasoned this was for efficiency as some, but not all, DLC has been completed. The same excuse was also made for Street Fighter X Tekken. If you’re playing against someone online but you don’t have the DLC characters but they do, you can still fight them with no problem!

Fans immediately knew this was baloney! After all, DLC stands for DownLoadable Content. If you don’t need to “download it,” then it’s not DLC! We all knew this was just a way for Capcom to make us pay for stuff that’s already been completed. In a way, this closely mirrors what Capcom is doing right now with the Capcom Cup Finals. They’re putting something that fans expect behind a paywall. And like with that situation, this also sucked really bad!

#5 The barebones release of Street Fighter V

After the disastrous start of Street Fighter III, Capcom put the franchise on ice. Years later, Capcom took a “gamble” and made Street Fighter IV. This not only revived the franchise but fighting games as a whole. So, Capcom was riding high with Street Fighter IV but we all wanted to see the next entry. We wanted to see the fifth official entry. We eventually got it in 2016… kinda. I say “kinda” as Street Fighter V launched with practically nothing! From keeping content locked away from my previous entry to having no content to this entry. How ironic!

The game initially launched with 16 characters. That’s not bad but, as we were coming off Ultra Street Fighter IV’s massive 44 character roster, this felt like a downgrade. But that wasn’t the barebones content I’m referring to. What I’m referring to is the lack of things to do in Street Fighter V! The only modes originally were very limited! You had a story mode for each character, with an ultra dumb AI a baby could beat… literally. You had a Survival mode where you would go through a gauntlet of CPU opponents to unlock stuff. You could practice in the Training mode. You can play some really awful online fights with terrible delay-based netcode. And… that’s it! Boo!

Street Fighter V didn’t have any of the niceties we expect in a modern fighting game. Heck, it didn’t have the niceties we expect in an old fighting game! There were no combo trials at launch. You could earn Fight Money, Street Fighter V’s in-game currency… but you couldn’t buy anything with it as the Shop wasn’t operational. The worst atrocity was there wasn’t an arcade ladder, the very thing we expect in every fighting game! Capcom did slowly add stuff to Street Fighter V and it did blossom into a great game by the end. However, it took them a long time to do so. To this day, Street Fighter V’s reputation hasn’t fully recovered from that initial hubris.

What other blunders can you think Capcom made? How about other game developers? Let me know in the comments section below!