Capcom’s upcoming installment of the Street Fighter franchise has recently gone through the beta testing stage. Utilizing Steam’s beta branch, Capcom held its first round of closed beta testing for Street Fighter 6 from October 6 through October 10, but they left the files available for testers to revisit down the line. Idleness leads to mischief unfortunately. On October 14, hackers made modifications to the beta game that made it playable offline.
For those unfamiliar, a closed beta test allows a limited number of players to play parts of a game still in development. Street Fighter 6 only included “ranked matches, open tournaments, and accessing the battle hub” while using the game’s online mods for a small group of players, but somehow hackers were able to access the file and play however they wanted offline. With this mod, they were able to “play outside the confines of the game’s testing periods,” including offline verses mode.
Whether the hackers were part of the beta testing team or merely stumbled across the files is unknown, but regardless, it wasn’t cool. What they did could possibly be considered a form of piracy. The Capcom team found out about the hack though and took care of it. In a patch released today, they removed the executable (.exe) file so that the game can no longer run.
A swift victory for Capcom, but it is still annoying that even a closed beta test could be taken advantage of. The video game industry is plagued with leaks and hackers, who hopefully won’t ruin things for the rest of us. Though in the end, no damage was done, there is an element of damaged trust.
Street Fighter 6 is an upcoming fighting game in the namesake franchise from Capcom. It is currently estimated to be released sometime in 2023, but we don’t know when exactly. The beta game was a way to test out gameplay modes like the battle hub, and depending on the results of the beta, it could be a short or long wait.
Speaking of gameplay modes, this upcoming fighting game will have three. Fighting Ground will be sort of a throw back mode to the origins of the franchise. It will be 2D with the options of training or arcade modes as well as local and online versus battles, so players can play against friends or other online players in a similar feel to the older games in the series. For fans who want to enjoy a more in-depth experience, World Tour is a 3D single-player story mode. Players get to customize their character and basically go on an adventure, so it’s less like the arcade origins of the game. Finally, the Battle Hub is a little more secret, and part of the closed beta testing, but we do know it will be some form of online lobby mode.
When it comes out sometime in 2023, Street Fighter 6 will be available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S.