Street Fighter 5’s in-game ads are gone, for now

Street Fighter 5: Arcade Edition’s in-game ads have come and gone. The garish and intrusive ads, optional though they may be, no longer display in Capcom’s fighting game, and Street Fighter series producer Yoshinori Ono said the company is looking at ways to improve them.

Sponsored content came to Street Fighter 5 in early December. While the initial pitch for in-game ads seemed tolerable at best, the implementation was ugly and comically bad. Ads for the Capcom Pro Tour were slathered over the flesh and costumes (and children’s skulls) of the Street Fighter roster.

As of this week, those ads are no more. Akuma’s gi is now free of a Capcom Pro Tour emblem on its back (as seen above), and where once Guile had a Capcom logo for a tattoo, now the fighter’s “ad-style” costume renders him without ink at all.

Capcom

Capcom never said that sponsored content would be permanent, nor that Capcom Pro Tour ads were supposed to stick around forever. The Capcom Pro Tour 2018 season came to an end on Dec. 16, and shortly after, Ono said the company was evaluating how sponsored content appeared in the game.

“We value and thank our community for providing feedback on the new Sponsored Content feature added to Street Fighter 5: Arcade Edition this week,” Ono said in a statement posted to Twitter. “We will continue collecting everyone’s feedback to consider how we can improve this new feature for players in the future.”

Those ads may return, hopefully in a less invasive way, when Capcom finds a new sponsor. For now, the implementation of costume-based ads behaves strangely, as trying to select an alternate costume color (specifically colors 3-10) prompts users that they’ll have to settle for one of two ad-style costume colors. Loading screen and stage-based ads simply no longer appear.