But that's ok, really. Success isn't always measured in dollars and cents, even in the rapidly changing development landscape and risk-averse console generation that Street Fighter IV found itself in. Yes, it did pretty well at the market --one source says roughly 8 million units by the end of it's string of releases-- but it wasn't one of the mega hits of the last ten years like singular released such as Halo 3 or Super Mario Galaxy.
I believe that this kind of monetary thinking is defeatist compared to the good that Street Fighter IV has done. Now that we're on the threshold of Street Fighter V's release, I think it's a fair time to assess IV's importance, because "important" is exactly what it is.
As I said last week, Street Fighter IV was designed specifically to appeal to an older, returning audience, so I don't really see the point in reiterating that here. What is worth mentioning was it's development and the embryonic period of its growth. It's now a well-publicized story that producer Yoshinori Ono had been working for Capcom since Third Strike (he was a sound designer) and wanted to make a new numbered game in the series for quite a while, which had been shut down by his superiors time and again. Capcom, a company known for taking a concept and drilling into the ground like a Seth McFarlane gag, had seemed to have bled as much money as it possibly could from the Street Fighter franchise. The PlayStation 2 era was basically keeping it in hospice as the publisher was content to release Anniversary compilations and quick cash-ins like Capcom Fighting Jam. The former did ok, trading more on nostalgia than innovation. The latter did lousy. Nobody wanted to play it, and now it's a laughing stock.
When taken collectively, though, there was a lesson here in these two releases in what the market could bear and who was buying. By the time the Xbox 360 was released, online play and an ephemeral downloadeable marketplace had become a viable concern, and one that the old guard like Capcom took notice of relatively early. 2006, then, is the year that Street Fighter punk broke. Whether it was a way of testing the waters with online infrastructure or to just cash in and bankroll another game in the newly-super expensive HD era, a port of Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting had made its way to XBLA. It's release, in hindsight, has become almost hilariously important to the landscape of fighting games.
The reason why, in short, is that it caused a seismic chain reaction of events outside of the scope of this particular writing, and this is something that I'll cover some day. What's ultimately worth mentioning are twofold: A) it had online match support, although this wasn't brand new for fighting games or even Capcom (the Anniversary's Third Strike port for the original Xbox could connect to the internet, as could a few Japan-only Dreamcast games) and B) it sold better than the company's expectations; much better, apparently. But, because this is the video game industry, there was a certain level of uproar. The online component of the game was its biggest criticism, and any review that you might look up from the time straddles the line between "hey, this is still a good game with bad connectivity," to "they should have never released it in this state." Still, in a single, inexpensive release of an old game, it reiterated to Capcom what Street Fighter Anniversary Collection and Capcom Fighting Jam had already told them: people are willing to pay for old, well-made games, and almost as importantly, they wanted these old games online.
Two games were quickly placed into development around this time. The first was Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, lead by longtime fighting game tournament player David Sirlin and his team at Backbone Entertainment, and the Ono-produced Street Fighter IV for Japanese arcades and home consoles. Both were released in 2008, though the console versions of SFIV didn't arrive until early 2009.
As companion pieces for each other, it was clear that those hard-earned lessons learned in the PS2 era were becoming axiom. HD Remix broke records for day-one downloads, and acted as the perfect appetizer for SFIV's eventual home release a few months later where it quickly became a million-seller. Again, like the releases of the PS2 era, both traded on nostalgia mixed with refinement. But for any number of reasons --new systems, a larger cast, nicer graphics, whatever-- Street Fighter IV had longer legs, its release igniting the real renaissance in for the genre. Licensed products featuring the game and its cast were finding their way back to the shelves, and gaming sites were featuring match videos and interviews with creators with increased frequency. A new numbered Street Fighter was a big deal again, something it hadn't been since the late 90s.
I don't know how long Street Fighter IV was in development, but we can assume at least two years, getting the game past the proposal stage around the latter end of 2006 (close enough after SFII Turbo XBLA launched). That's about a year after the launch of YouTube, and roughly close to the launch of GGPO, two mutual monumental steps for both fighting games and videogames as a whole. With the latter, stable online fighting games were now possible with some clever latency masking. Though it wasn't as widely adopted by companies like Capcom, it was a clear step in the right direction to build a fighting game's netcode, and had to be noticed. The former, well, you know. SFIV's release a few years later was the absolute perfect timing for an ultra-competitive throwback genre to re-enter the mainstream. Online tournaments matches for training and glory were now a nightly ritual for even casual fans. Tournaments large and small were now being archived on the internet for people to study like playback tape at a high school football practice. Tournaments themselves went from tiny grassroots gatherings set up on forums to big, consistent business in terms of attendance and prize money.
The sum of these parts is that Street Fighter was doing what it did best in its 90s heyday: people were coming together again. Whether it was for competition or camaraderie, players could meet, play, argue, and learn from each other, and had further tools to do so on their own. This is Street Fighter IV's greatest legacy. Now that we're on the precipice of a new numbered Street Fighter in a few days --again, a big deal-- it was worth pointing it out, if only briefly.
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