Capcom and Taito have announced that Street Fighter 5: Type Arcade’s servers will shut down on April 1. That doesn’t seem like too big a deal, right? No more balance patches, over the air updates, or online play… that’s workable. SF5 is finished, after all. But, no – this is worse than that: all arcade versions of Street Fighter 5 will stop working, even offline, on that date.
It’s fascinating to see this happen in arcades, as arcade gaming feels a world away from the nightmarish always-online debate. But here we are. Even Street Fighter 5’s arcade version is heavily online-connected – and once that connectivity is shut off, the game will essentially cease to exist. There will be no final Type Arcade patch to leave the game playable in perpetuity. Fans of SF5 are invited, instead, to play the console version.
But where does this really leave us? I’d call this the thin end of the wedge, but it feels like that actually happened a little while ago. What happens when Capcom decides it no longer wants to maintain the console and PC servers for SF5? In 15 years, will any version of SF5 be playable? The answer shouldn’t be anything but an emphatic yes, but now, it feels like there’s no guarantees. It’s the slipperiest of slopes.
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