The new update for Street Fighter 6 has caused a huge surge in player interest. It helped the game cement itself as likely the most actively played title in the genre at the moment.
On May 22, Capcom added Akuma, the iconic antagonist of the Street Fighter series, to SF6. He is also the final character of the game’s first year.
Along with Akuma’s addition, the company also released a patch with tons of balance adjustments and fixes. So it is no surprise that the core audience flocked to Street Fighter 6 to not only try the new character, but also to check out gameplay changes.
According to SteamDB, Street Fighter 6 peaked at 70,202 concurrent players on Steam yesterday. This is just 371 short of the game’s all-time high of 70,573 CCU.
Of course, we don’t know how the player count has changed on other platforms (PlayStation and Xbox), but almost breaking its CCU record 11 months after launch is still an impressive achievement.
This is something you rarely see in other live fighting games. For example, Mortal Kombat 1 never came close to its 38.1k peak, averaging just about 1,400 concurrent players per day despite several patches and new character releases. The same goes for most other premium titles in the genre, including Tekken 8 (and 7), Dragon Ball FightgerZ, Guilty Gear -Strive, and Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising.
The only other exception might be Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, which just broke its player count record four years after the previous peak of 7,185 CCU. Thanks to a huge sale, the game reached its new all-time high of 8,345 CCU.
Street Fighter 6 is one of the most commercially successful fighting games in recent years. It surpassed 1 million players in just three days after its launch in June 2023, reaching 2 million copies sold in its first month. As of March 31, 2024, SF6 sold 3.3 million units across all platforms, becoming 31st best-selling release in the history of Capcom.