Almost three years after it first launched, Street Fighter 6 has hit an all-time player peak on Steam, and it's all thanks to the series' failed Ryu successor.
Street Fighter 3 and its subsequent iterations are perhaps one of the biggest examples of games not getting their flowers until much later in life. After six years of waiting for a true follow-up to Street Fighter 2, "The New Generation" arrived, with quite the literal name, as Capcom had only opted to bring back Ryu and Ken (and later Akuma and Chun-Li for later versions) and leave it at that. Street Fighter 3's new cast of characters was supposed to bring a whole new generation of fighters to the forefront of the series, but the negative reaction made it a bit of a flop and scared Capcom from excluding the Street Fighter 2 cast in any subsequent entry.
Alex – a pro wrestler who was pegged to be Ryu's successor as the new face of the series as the main character in 3 – was just released as DLC for Street Fighter 6, and all of these years later – despite being the face of the series biggest commercial setback – has caused the game to skyrocket.
According to SteamDB, yesterday, when Alex released, the Street Fighter 6 player count on Steam reached a new all-time high of 72,067. The game's previous high was 70,573 in June 2023 when Capcom first released the fighting game, with a spike of 70,202 in May 2024 when perennial DLC favorite Akuma joined the game.
Of course, the release of Alex also coincided with a new balance patch for Tekken 8, which the fanbase seems really unhappy about, so it may have contributed to some new players. But what I'm seeing – and what I really hope Capcom is seeing so I don't need to wait three years for my main to arrive again – is that Alex is a draw.
