Among all the cancellations and issues being caused by the outbreak and spread of the coronavirus, Capcom officially pulled three events from the 2020 Capcom Pro Tour lineup today.
Brussels Challenge 2020, Norcal Regionals 2020, and April Annihilation 2020 will now have no direct impact on the Pro Tour leaderboards. That makes it’s less likely that top players will travel to those events to compete in Street Fighter V: Champion Edition.
This decision comes just weeks before many players would have traveled to Brussels to compete in the first Pro Tour event of the year. Now, instead of the Brussels Challenge kicking that off on March 20, it’ll begin with The MIXUP 2020 in Lyon, France on April 18.
“Capcom has been closely monitoring news relating to the novel coronavirus outbreak, and we have decided to remove Brussels Challenge 2020, Norcal Regionals 2020, and April Annihilation 2020 from this year’s Capcom Pro Tour,” Capcom said. “The safety of our fans and players is our top priority. This decision in no way reflects upon the various tournament organizers.”
This means the events won’t be featured in the Pro Tour lineup and Capcom is pulling the CPT points available at each tournament.
“Points allocated to these events will be removed from the pool,” Capcom said. “All points for the remaining schedule will stay intact.”
This news won’t affect the actual tournaments since each of them will still be active on their usual dates and even include SFV in the game lineups. But this will heavily impact how many of the top SF players attend each tournament now that the CPT has pulled out and players can’t earn points.
“We apologize if this decision inconveniences any of our players, community members, or production partners,” Capcom said. “Capcom will continue to monitor the situation and will evaluate the need for additional schedule modifications as the situation evolves.”
Capcom is the first fighting game circuit to actively cancel its plans to support an established event over coronavirus concerns. This could set more moves like this into motion for Tekken and Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour.
