Image: Capcom
Capcom is upping the prize pool for next year’s Street Fighter 6 tournament from $300K to a massive $2 million.
During the conclusion of the ninth Capcom Pro Tour, Capcom announced that next year’s Street Fighter 6 tournament will have a massive prize pool of $2 million, with a whole $1 million going to the champ. With that kind of money on the line, you’d better start picking your main quickly.
This upcoming Street Fighter 6-focused Pro Tour will see its prize pool bumped up from $300K to $2 million, in a clear effort to cultivate the esports scene around the upcoming fighting game. $1 million goes to the winner of the Pro Tour’s final event, the Capcom Cup. By comparison, this year’s winner got $120K in total. That makes for quite a substantial step up.
Prize pools like these are something of an abnormality in the fighting game scene, even if games like Rainbow Six Siege, Fortnite and DOTA 2 manage to put up far bigger numbers in their tournaments all the time. The biggest prize pool a fighting game tournament has seen recently was $1.3 million for a Brawlhalla tournament - and that was done with the almighty power of Ubisoft backing the event.
The winner of this year’s Capcom Cup IX was Saul Leonardo ‘MenaRD’ Mena, who also became the tournament’s first two-time winner and final Street Fighter 5 champion upon picking up his trophy. Capcom Cup X will probably kick off around February 2024, and such a massive prize pool shows that Capcom is willing to fork up to make it one of the biggest events in the tournament’s history to date.
Street Fighter 6 launches on June 2, 2023, on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox Series X|S and even on Japanese arcade machines later in the year. The game has a roster of 18 fighters, six of whom are new faces in the franchise, along with a campaign storyline that lets players explore semi-open world environments and an online lobby mode.