Street Fighter V is coming back to a television near you.
During a Sunday night airing of SportsCenter, ESPN revealed that it will air this year’s Capcom Cup on ESPN2 on Dec. 4 at a time to be announced later.
The Capcom Cup, which serves as the Capcom Pro Tour’s season championship, will be the second Street Fighter V event to air on the network. ESPN2 aired the finals of the game’s 5,100-player tournament at Evo this past July. That show drew over 200,000 viewers—a number that, according to numbers from SportsTVRatings.com, was in line with the network’s typical ratings for more traditional sports broadcasts in its timeslot.
Another 200,000 viewers watched Evo on Twitch, as the event was simultaneously streamed on Twitch and broadcast on ESPN2.
That won’t be the case for the Capcom Cup.
This year’s Capcom Cup will take place on Friday, Dec. 2 and Saturday, Dec. 3, with the ESPN2 broadcast airing the following day. It’s unclear whether Sunday’s broadcast will act as a highlight reel from the entire tournament or primarily focus on Saturday’s finals where over $350,000 will be awarded.
Capcom will stream the entire tournament live on its CapcomFighters Twitch channel.
The ESPN2 news wasn’t the only major Capcom Cup happening of the weekend.
Capcom announced via Twitter on Sunday that Tse “Tse4444” Wa Ping of Hong Kong will miss the Capcom Cup. In the same tweet, Capcom confirmed that Chile’s Felipe “Misterio” Torres will also miss the championship event. Misterio had announced his withdrawal via Twitter two days before Capcom’s confirmation.
The players will be replaced by Atsushi “Yukadon” Fujimura of Japan and Kenneth “K-Brad” Bradley of the United States. Among players who had not qualified for the Capcom Cup, Yukadon and K-Brad were the highest-ranking players in the Asian and Latin American regions respectively.
Tse4444’s withdrawal was a bit of a surprise, but Misterio’s absence had been rumored for weeks. Commentators at the Treta Championships in early October mentioned that the Chilean player would likely miss the event, citing unspecified visa issues. The issues were mentioned again during the broadcast of the Latin American Regional Finals earlier this month.
Misterio did not specify a reason for withdrawal on Friday. Capcom provided no specific information about either player’s withdraw on Sunday.
The additions of Yukadon and K-Brad to the event significantly changes the bracket. The event’s seeding is based on the global leaderboard standings, and both players have earned large chunks of their points outside of the regions which they will represent this weekend. Because of that, both players are ranked higher than the ones they replaced.
Yukadon, the tournament’s 24th seed, is expected to face ninth-seeded Umehara Daigo in the opening round. K-Brad, ranked 25th, will likely begin his tournament against eighth-seeded Egami “MOV” Joe.
Capcom will reveal the tournament’s official bracket on Monday.
