Street Fighter 5 may still be going strong, but fighting game fans have been eagerly awaiting the announcement of Capcom’s next fighting game. Rumors have been circulating that this fighting game is likely Street Fighter 6, the follow up to SF5, and potentially a continuation of the story in Street Fighter 3 finally.

Ryan “Filipino Champ” Ramirez took to his stream recently and rekindled this theory, as well as dropped some interesting news on Marvel vs Capcom 4, which has also been rumored to be in development since Capcom abandoned Marvel vs Capcom Infinite out to pasture.

“Marvel 4 was supposed to be in production already around 2018, ” Fchamp said on his stream. “They’ve been working on it for awhile. I didn’t really see the full game or anything like that. It was supposed to be under production. They were in contact with Marvel to receive the list of characters that they could actually work on. They basically did an “option select” development. It’s so funny – they already made the functions of these characters and then if they get approval for a certain character, then they’ll apply that character’s model to the moveset. They were already preparing for the function. In the event they didn’t get the Marvel license, they were just going to make a Capcom All-Stars fighting game.”

FChamp elaborated that all of this information came from late 2018, early 2019 when he still had contacts at Capcom. Now, all of his contacts have “moved on,” and none of their replacements are leaking what’s going on, according to the player, anyway. From here, Champ gets a little unclear as to exactly what’s happening with development currently, but he speculates that both the Intel partnership for the Intel World Open, as well as COVID-19 might have had some impact on Capcom’s continuing efforts. Champ was also a bit unclear as to whether or not Capcom obtained the license from Marvel to work on the title, but given that Capcom has not even remotely hinted at an announcement coming anytime soon, it’s possible that it got delayed to til the next generation of hardware.

Given that Capcom is still trying to live down the ill-will that they received at the launch of Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, this is unsurprising, and perhaps even fortuitous. Doubly so in that since Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite’s launch, Disney purchased Fox, and allowed Marvel access to all of their characters, most notably the X-Men, Deadpool, and Fantastic Four. This would solve one of the biggest complains about Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, that Capcom was forced to cut a lot of these characters due to licensing concerts, and a general want from Marvel to promote the upcoming Infinity War and Endgame rather than focus on older characters that wouldn’t appear in those movies. Of course, that reasoning was never confirmed, but looking at the roster it’s pretty obvious.

With COVID-19 disrupting development plans around the world for various titles, it seems that Capcom is no different. Fchamp alleges in his stream that the main reason we have more Street Fighter 5 characters to look forward to is because of this delay and lack of being able to collaborate directly in the studio has caused the team to instead focus on more new SF6 characters. 

“Everything in development is [on pause], so they decided to extend Street Fighter 5 by another year and release another season of characters,” he said. “Now we’re basically stuck with 18 months or more of SF5, or two years, so that kind of sucks. They could announce Street Fighter 6 at Evo [which got cancelled] – they announced SF5 at Capcom Cup 2014 and then released the game in 2016, so just because they announce doesn’t mean they have to release it anytime soon. I’m pretty sure at Capcom Cup they should announce something about SF6, but that’s all I know.”

Given that Street Fighter 5 seemed to have something of a rushed development cycle, it would certainly behoove them to spend a little extra time and effort getting the game fully ready for launch. This could give them more time to incorporate some of the modes that made Street Fighter 5 better in the years after its launch, including a fully cinematic story mode, more options for netplay, dojos, and more. Hopefully, they are also incorporating what they’ve learned from their other titles, most notably Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, which had rollback netcode.

Either way, it seems that we’re set to hear something about Capcom’s plans sometime soon, but despite fresh rumors surrounding Street Fighter 6, it may have to wait until later this year or early next year when Capcom can actually get their pipeline back up and running.