14 DAY TRIAL // The Street Fighter franchise is probably one of the most popular fighting series of games out there, with fans all over the world. Because of this massive popularity, Capcom, the company that owns the Street Fighter IP (Intellectual Property), decided to revive the franchise and take it to a whole new level.
The first part in this two-stage process consisted of launching a new game, based on one of the most popular titles in the series, but with new, redesigned characters, which would look good on today's high-end consoles. This game materialized in the form of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, which was launched a day before Thanksgiving on the Xbox 360 Live Arcade and on the PlayStation Network.
But, even though the launch went off without a problem, a small amount of users found some glitches in the game, which they had eagerly anticipated. From the fact that the music suddenly stopped playing to having trouble earning some Achievements or Trophies, these issues became very annoying for users, who asked Capcom for a patch in order to fix them.
But fans shouldn't think that Capcom will release such a patch soon, as David Sirlin, the lead designer of Street Fighter HD, stated that a patching process for a console game was quite expensive and complicated. He went on to say that developers needed to pay console manufacturers for the patches and make use of a lot of testing and focus groups in order to evaluate the patch.
“It was very hard to get Puzzle Fighter patched at all. There's a lot of difficulty in patching console games. First of all you have to pay the console makers for each of these patches and second you have to do QA and bug testing on these patches. If you change one area of the game to fix a problem with it, as far as the publisher knows, they don't know you didn't make some mistake in some different part of the game, so they are pretty much obliged to do testing across the board.”
But even though the process is hard, Capcom is up for it, or at least that's what Serlin thinks: “The question is, is the upside big enough to justify it? With Street Fighter I hope the answer is yes. I hope the answer is, definitely, we want to fix as much as we can and have this keep selling for many many many years. I'm of the opinion that [Capcom] thinks that. That seems logical to me.”
All in all, some pretty interesting statements, but which can't really offer any solutions to the upset Street Fighter fans. Let's just hope that a patch will be made and that the new game, Street Fighter IV, won't have any problems.