Street Fighter 6 Dev Talks New SFL Format, Age Groups In New Interview

Street Fighter 6's director, Takayuki Nakayama, has stated some very exciting things about Street Fighter 6 including the reduced average age of players, a rise in female players and some new elements to the popular Street Fighter League.

He made this known in an interview with Yahoo Japan where he talked a lot about the new accessiblilty options in Street Fighter 6 especially for the visually impaired. Street Fighter 6's accessibility options have been praised and got quite a bit of attention at Evo 2023 where a blind player won an official match. 

Asked how that made him feel, Nakayama said he was proud as he was also on site and got to see it happen. 

When talking about some of the things he had noticed with the release of Street Fighter 6, Nakayama claimed that the average age of those who play Street Fighter 6 has gone down from men in their 30s to both men and women in their 20s. This is significant as there has been a rise in female gamers including for fighting games and Street Fighter 6 has been a welcoming place for them. On top of that, the implementation of Modern controls has helped in this regard and according to Nakayama, Of course, I was aiming for rejuvenation (of player base), but it was not easy to achieve it. As a developer, we have been aiming to make the game easier for more people to pick up and enjoy with peace of mind by improving accessibility. By introducing the ``World Tour'' mode that allows you to learn how to play a fighting game, I feel that the game has become easier for beginners to start playing. After the product was released, I realized that this initiative was an opportunity to attract a new user base."

There was a little snippet regarding Street Fighter League which will be moving to a 2-league system from later this year, but it seems we'll get more details later. 

Street Fighter 6's first season is coming to an end and the much anticipated second season should begin in June 2024.