It’s safe to say that Street Fighter 6 is dominating the current fighting game landscape. With what seems like near-flawless decision-making from Capcom, the latest iteration in the studio’s long-running fighting game franchise just continues to rack up one success after another, with its most recent win being the competitive turnout at EVO Vegas 2025. Street Fighter 6 had a whopping 4,228 players enter to compete, with Street Fighter‘s closest rival, Tekken 8, drawing just 2,521. The third of the “big three” of modern fighting games, Mortal Kombat 1, only had 377 contestants. But the question is, why? What steps has Capcom taken to snowball a lead over the competition when it comes to the mainstream fighting game scene? Why can no other fighting game touch Street Fighter 6 right now?
A Passionate Competitive Scene
©Photo: TempusRob
Since its release in 2023, Street Fighter 6 has been pulling large numbers of competitive players over to the game. When it made its competitive debut at EVO 2023, it set the record for the most EVO entrants ever, with over 7,000 players signing up to compete. When it comes to competition, Street Fighter 6‘s support is unparalleled. As one of the larger active player bases, Street Fighter 6‘s faithful are passionate and have a large community to connect with, and the Capcom Cup’s first-place million-dollar payouts incentivize players to dedicate hours to the grind toward perfection. While money isn’t everything, it’s hard to deny that it plays a pivotal role in creating an unprecedented number of players wanting to train to win. And since passion is at an all-time high, it’s that much more interesting to watch.
This isn’t to say that Tekken and Mortal Kombat aren’t also pulling in their fair share of competitors. It’s just that their competitive communities seem less significant when stacked against the juggernaut that is Street Fighter 6. Tekken World Tour is gaining traction in competitive fighting game circles, but with its significantly smaller prize pool, the draw isn’t comparable to the Capcom Cup. Mortal Kombat 1‘s main event, the Pro Kompetition Circuit, offers $ 255,000 in total to its entrants, which is significantly less than the other two. But money aside, Street Fighter 6 also has more viewers than its contemporaries. In 2024, Street Fighter 6 streams garnered 158 million hours watched, nearly tripling the 55 million hours watched by Tekken 8 fans.
A Fighting Game For Everyone
©Street Fighter 6 gameplay screenshot – Original
Over the last few years, fighting games have been making strides in their efforts to reach a broader audience. Street Fighter 6 utilizes an alternative control scheme, reducing the execution barrier commonly found in the genre. This alternative control scheme, known as Modern Controls, tends to dominate much of the discussion regarding the accessibility of Street Fighter 6. The title also has plenty of single-player content for those who are more interested in the world and characters of Street Fighter instead of wanting to be the best at competitive play. Street Fighter 6 strikes a perfect balance between competitive and casual gameplay, and Modern Controls only further lowers the barrier between the two for those who are more casual.
When it comes to modern fighting games, the inclusion of Rollback Netcode and the quality of online matches are essential pillars of a title’s success. Street Fighter 6 has excellent netcode, but in all honesty, all three of the major fighting game franchises have reliable rollback netcode. That said, the issues Mortal Kombat 1 had with its netcode post-launch didn’t do it any favors.
When it comes to the “big three” fighters, Street Fighter 6 also features the best-ranked system, which adopts a points-based system from the beginner to intermediate levels. With this system, anyone can graduate to the highest tier of play — the Master tier — with enough games. However, once a player reaches Master, the ranked system transitions to an ELO system, similar to Chess and other competitive games like League of Legends. Tekken and Mortal Kombat‘s ranked systems are competent, but they simply can’t compare to the ELO systems when it comes to accurately ranking a player’s skill.
A Diverse Character Roster
Street Fighter has never been a franchise to shy away from showcasing diverse cultures from around the world, and the same can be said of the series’ latest iteration. The 18 characters that launched with Street Fighter 6 span 13 nationalities across four continents. The characters are not only varied in terms of race and culture, but they are also diverse in body types. Half of the starting roster were women, but they varied in their shapes and sizes, moving away from some of the hyper-sexualized characters that fighting games used to be notorious for including. Capcom isn’t perfect when it comes to honoring cultures, including facing criticism for Lily being a surface-level representation of indigenous culture, but it is one of several studios leading the charge for better representation in video games, emphasizing different cultures, genders, and even ages among its playable characters.
Inclusivity and diversity in fighting game rosters isn’t exclusive to Street Fighter 6 — just look at the rosters of Tekken, Mortal Kombat, and even Guilty Gear Strive. Guilty Gear Strive even makes some bold strides toward adequate LGBTQ representation with standout characters like Bridget and Testament. But the Street Fighter franchise has been doing it for years, and it only continues to push the envelope when it comes to allowing players to control fighters that accurately represent their heritage or cultural identity, tapping into a global community of fighting game fans.
The image featured at the top of this post is ©Image: Capcom / Original