Street Fighter V fell short of its initial sales projections by 30 percent, Capcom revealed in its annual financial statements earlier today.
Street Fighter V sold 1.4 million copies on PlayStation 4 and PC, well short of the 2 million copies the company had projected to sell in the first six weeks of release.
The game has been incredibly popular among serious players, with many tournaments seeing massive increases in entrants over last year’s events, but word of the game’s lack of single-player content scared off many casual players. At release, each character’s “story” consisted of a few static images and a handful of one-round fights against low-difficulty opponents, although this is expected to expand to some extent in June via an update. The game lacks a typical arcade mode and did not have any sort of combo trial mode until late March.
To date, 47 percent of the game’s user reviews on Steam are positive. The PC version’s Metacritic user score is 2.7 out of 10, despite earning a 74 out of 100 among professional reviewers. The PlayStation 4 version has received similar scores on both counts.
Much of the funding for the development of Street Fighter V, along with much of the $1,000,000 in prizing that has been and will be awarded on the Capcom Pro Tour in the 2015 and 2016 seasons, came from Sony in exchange for console exclusivity. It’s unclear what impact, if any, these sales figures will have on the future of that relationship.
Despite the failure to meet sales expectations, Monday’s report featured lots of good news for Capcom. The company reported tremendous sales for Monster Hunter X, which sold 3.3 million units for the Nintendo 3DS compared to its expected 2.5 million. The latest mobile entry to that series, Monster Hunters Explore, was downloaded more than 3 million times. The success of that series was a key part of Capcom’s success in FY2015, as the company reported a net profit of nearly ¥7.75 billion (approximately $71.5 million), a 17 percent increase over last year.
