It's been eight years since Street Fighter V first appeared on the scene, and to celebrate the big birthday Capcom took to Twitter to say thanks for sticking with it—and, y'know, sorry for the whole thing.

Street Fighter V has a “mostly positive” user rating on Steam and a respectable 77 aggregate score on Metacritic, so it's easy to forget that it was not exactly in fighting shape at launch. We found the underlying game quite good for experienced players but “miserably light on content,” and “simply abysmal” for newcomers to the series. Server issues (which Capcom also apologized for) and rage quitters were big problems too. 

It was all eventually sorted out but those early days were not great, and Capcom has not forgotten.

“From the beginning to the middle of the release, there were network issues, lack of content, etc,” the StreetfighterJA account tweeted (via RPS). “We are truly sorry for the content that did not meet the expectations of many of you.

“From the middle to the end of the game, the Street Fighter V development team did a lot of self-reflection and worked hard to resolve the issues as much as possible.”

Of course, the ending was happy: Fixes were made, more characters and content were added, and player counts went up “significantly” after the launch of season 4. Lessons learned from Street Fighter V were applied to Street Fighter 6, and it showed: We said in our 89% review that the newest game in the series is “one of the best fighting games we've seen in the last decade,” and it was a big sales hit too.