Street Fighter 6 Is Leading Early Evo Japan Player Numbers

One of the Reddit users, PhantomChocobo over at r/Kappachino (check that place at your own risk) has made a nifty graph of current Evo Japan registration numbers. While it's too early to draw any major conclusions, one thing is certainly clear – Street Fighter 6 is still overwhelmingly popular in Japan.

Sitting at 1582 entrants when the graph was being made, it quite literally towers over every single other game at Evo Japan 2026. 

The numbers for other entries are bound to fill out, but this sort of popularity for just one title is almost unprecedented, and honestly a bit worrisome. 

No, it doesn't mean that other games are dead, bad, or anything of the sort. But it's also not really the healthiest possible position to be in when the entire genre basically orbits around one major title. On one hand, you could say that fighting games are more popular than ever, on the other, are they?

What does it spell for the future of the genre when the majority of its audience only truly plays one title, while the rest have to rely on the niche audience of diehard lifers who play one game, and the few hardcore fighting game fans who actively play a wide selection of titles?

Hopefully the final registry numbers paint a more optimistic picture, or the Las Vegas Evo shows a more even line-up when it comes to players, but for now, all that's left to do is to congratulate Capcom on being the only ones to somehow capture a new audience.

We can only hope that upcoming fighting games can enjoy even half of this prosperity, simple because it would be much healthier for the genre when lots of different games are allowed to not only exist, but actually thrive and maintain a solid playerbase.