Street Fighter V was officially announced as a PlayStation 4 and PC exclusive today, but the news got out a bit earlier than planned thanks to a YouTube video leak yesterday. Speaking with Famitsu at PlayStation Experience, series producer Yoshinori Ono touched upon the leak, as well as the game’s response, concept, and PlayStation 4 and PC cross-play.
Leak
“When the leak got out, we held an emergency meeting with Sony about what to do,” Ono said with a laugh. “Today we showed off that footage of Ryu and Chun Li, right? We actually weren’t intending to show anything of the sort off today… We had planned to show it off next week in San Francisco at the Capcom Cup. But things change and it wasn’t like at this point we couldn’t show anything off at all. So we made a last minute decision to change our program and threw it on.
But that doesn’t mean next week will be all repeat.
“We still have more to show off next week, though,” Ono assured. “We’ve got more secret material lined up yet.”
Reaction
“It’s been great!” Ono said. “It’s interesting how different it can be even at similar, but different venues. Like at Comic Con, the response to specific character reveals tends to be big, but here today when it was just a general game playing audience gathered, they were wowed even just by how we’re doing cross-play between the PlayStation 4 and PC versions.
“It’s really great to be able to get something in front of people and get an immediate reaction like that. I wouldn’t mind if Sony just made this event a yearly thing moving forward. I feel it’s important that the players have events like this where they can actually participate in stuff like this. It’d be great even in Japan! (Laughs.)”
Concept
“Well, we said that we’ll have a playable demo at the Capcom Cup next week, yes?” Ono said. “I think people who haven’t played a recent Street Fighter game, but used to play the old ones, will be able to look at that and start feeling the urge to pick it up again. That’s my opinion, at least.
“And that can include people who have played II, III, even older flavors of IV. If you’re someone who used to be way into Street Fighter and was addicted to it back in the day, I’d suggest keeping an eye out for what we have to show today. I think we’re going to be able to reignate that fervor again with this game. Make people want to go out and do these things that we’ll be showing.”
PlayStation 4 and PC Cross-Play
“It is hard,” Ono said. “Up until now, we’ve just had it so each SKU’s multiplayer functionality was contained to its platform. Now we’ve got a lot of problems to tackle on our plate, especially with respect to how to prevent cheating. Of course, we don’t want to prevent players from only playing with other people on their own platform and we want to give them their own dedicated lobbies as well. We’re just trying to help bridge the community together through these efforts.”
A release date for Street Fighter V has not been announced.