Street Fighter 5‘s first beta officially canceled

It has certainly been a rough weekend for Street Fighter 5 fans. Playstation 4 players, in particular, we chomping at the bit to get their hands on the online beta that kicked off on the evening of the 23rd. Unfortunately, most players never got the chance to experience the game as the servers completely buckled under the pressure shortly after it kicked off. Capcom took the servers offline for a while to deploy fixes, but things never got any better. After days of tinkering with the netcode and attempts to limit the user base, Capcom ultimately decided to pull the plug on the beta all together.

What does this mean for the final game? Well, nothing yet. Capcom is hard at work in recifying the issues that took the game down this weekend and is promising to attempt the beta again sometime down the line. The developer says it will keep its promise of offering three separate beta opportunities for players before launch. They are also promising some sort of incentive for anyone who was effected by this weekends beta issues, although the details as to what that means are still a mystery.

However, as a gamer, I have a little bit of concern for the game at this point in time. I have heard of beta tests going awry, but this one proved to be an absolute disaster. It concerns me that they felt their netcode and game was ready for (at least) limited public consumption and in actuality it wasn’t. How far back will this set the development cycle of the game overall? Will Capcom still be able to hit their targeted release date of February 2016? Honestly, I think that there is an inevitable delay in store for Street Fighter 5 and in this case, that would be a good thing. We don’t want to game launching to problems even remotely similar to this.