New Street Fighter Coming to Mobile From Capcom and Skillz

Capcom announced today that its subsidiary Beeline, which specializes in bringing Capcom games to mobile, will be joining up with the mobile esports platform Skillz to bring a brand new Street Fighter game to mobile. The goal is to bring a truly competitive Street Fighter experience to mobile, while integrating the competitive scene into the Skillz platform seamlessly, where players will be able to tune in and watch competitive play with the tap of a screen.

“We’ve always believed that multiplayer and spectatorship are integral to the Street Fighter experience,” said Midori Yuasa, CEO of Beeline Interactive, Inc. “We’re excited to partner with the Skillz platform to deliver the next evolution of this competitive series to mobile gamers.”

“With this partnership, Street Fighter will define the future of competitive mobile gameplay,” said Andrew Paradise, CEO and founder of Skillz. “With worldwide competitions and countless physically organized events, Street Fighter has helped lay the foundation of modern pro gaming for both players and spectators. We’re excited to facilitate the delivery of this competitive experience to mobile gamers.”

Beeline and Skillz are promising a wholly unique Street Fighter experience on mobile, so I don’t think we’re looking at a quick port here. This is going to be something optimized for mobile users, and very likely optimized for touch-screen controls. Whether or not Bluetooth controllers will be emphasized or not I can’t say, but I imagine not since we’ll want to look forward to a level competitive foundation.

If you’re at all skeptical about a fighting game on mobile, I recommend you check out Injustice 2 and Skullgirls. Skullgirls especially proves that you can take a highly technical fighting game and translate the controls to a touch-screen interface and find success. The competitive Skullgirls scene have praised the mobile version for being highly playable, which is saying something.

This is something that we’ll be keeping a close eye on. We at WWG believe that esports and the mobile gaming scene are both growing at shockingly rapid rates, and both scenes have the potential to merge together into something very powerful; imminently accessible; incredibly exciting. It sounds like Capcom is attempting to stay swinging on the bleeding edge of this trend, and we think that that’s a good idea. Stay tuned to WWG for more on this.