Capcom Archives - Dot Esports

Street Fighter V is free on Steam this weekend to celebrate the start of Evo 2018, the biggest fighting game tournament in the world.

The free weekend will run from now until Aug. 6, and the game can be purchased for a 40-percent discount on both Steam and the PS Store on PlayStation 4.

Capcom announced on Thursday that player Noel Brown will be barred from participating in Capcom Pro Tour events for the remainder of the 2016 season. The announcement marked the first time that the company had banned someone from the Pro Tour in its three-year history.

Within hours of Capcom’s announcement, organizers of both Evo and the Killer Instinct World Cup announced similar punishments for Evo 2016 and the 2016-2017 Killer Instinct World Cup Qualifying Series respectively.

A newly numbered release tends to be monumental in the Street Fighter world. Street Fighter II revolutionized the genre and popularized it. Street Fighter III pushed boundaries, perhaps a bit too far in some eyes, and despite acclaim, never saw the same success as its predecessor.

Based upon this, some thought another version would never come out. In 2008, however, Street Fighter IV was released and rocked the genre. So much so in fact, that five versions of that game were released. Attendance at fighting game tournaments like Evo jumped from hundreds to thousands, and star players like Daigo Umehara are now immortalized in manga and figurines.

Taut matches between top-level competitors are so rewarding to watch and so fascinating in their interplay, that it’s natural to wish they would never end. For Street Fighter fans, your wish is granted.

Team Blackeye recently held an exhibition match between its marquee Rolento player, Nemo, and Razer’s Kun Xian Ho, a Singaporean Gen player currently in the world top five. Fortunately for fans, this was more than just a routine best-of-five showdown.

The Capcom Cup is quickly becoming a fixture of the esports calendar. Now, the makers of Street Fighter appear to be doubling down on its esports push with the “Capcom Fighters Network.”

Fighting games news staple EventHubs recently discovered a trademark filing by the Japanese game maker for something called the “Capcom Fighters Network trademark,” filed on April 1 in Japan and April 2 in the United States. While the true nature of the project remains nebulous, the filing itself provided several hints regarding the intended functionality of the service.

This year, Capcom is going to make some of the world’s best fighting game players rich—or at least pretty well off.

That’s the big takeaway from the company’s official announcement regarding this year’s edition of the Capcom Pro Tour, announced in December to feature a minimum of $500,000 in total prize money. The company offered details about the tour’s format last night, and it threw around some appropriately big numbers.

Few things can generate more discussion among fighting game players than a developer altering a game’s gameplay. Upsetting the careful balance between the game’s characters can have a dramatic effect on the way it’s played.

But it’s rare that a developer makes such changes without first announcing them, and even rarer for it to claim they were accidental. Such is the case with Capcom and their premier fighting game franchise, Street Fighter.

Capcom’s revealed its plans for the latest incarnation of its classic fighting game Street Fighter at E3 today, including one major change that could upend how the series is played.

The company’s president, Haruhiro Tsujimoto, emphasized a push to broaden the player base in Street Fighter 5 to make the game more profitable. And that could mean monetizing some elements of the game—essentially making a pay-to-win title.

The world’s top three esports have a few million things in common.

League of Legends, Dota 2, and StarCraft 2’ have all benefited from multi-million investments from the games’ developers. In turn, this has helped transformed those games into massively popular international phenomenons.