Tekken boss Harada says he’s ‘quite interested’ in Capcom’s decision to charge for Street Fighter tournament streams
“A lot of influencers are making big money” off streaming tournaments, Harada says
Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada says he’s been taking an interest in Capcom’s decision to charge fans who want to stream upcoming Street Fighter 6 tournament finals.
It was announced during Tokyo Game Show in September that the finals of Capcom Cup 12 and the SFL World Championship would be streaming live via pay-per-view.
The announcement stated that fans who want to watch the tournament finals online will have to pay ¥4,000 ($27) to watch the Capcom Cup 12 Finals on March 14, 2026 and another ¥4,000 ($27) to watch the SFL World Championship on March 15, 2026. Alternatively, a bundle is available for ¥6,000 ($40) that allows them to watch both finals.
This was met with backlash from Street Fighter fans, which led to Capcom saying it was “reviewing pricing”, with “updated information regarding the PPV broadcast, including final pricing and additional context” coming in the future.
Update - Harada comments
In a series of social media posts, Harada has moved to clarify his comments and said that they do not signal any intention of making streaming a paid service in his games.
“I never said a single word about wanting to turn it into paid content (I only said, “I wonder or interest how that could be achieved?”),” he wrote. “In the first place, I am not even positive about monetization. The context and interpretation may have been created by the article, but judging from the flow of the conversation, you would have to interpret it extremely negatively to think that I was trying to make streaming paid.
“In any case, it is unlikely that it will be monetized, and in fact, the operation of streaming and TWT has never fallen within the scope of our business since the very beginning (because prize money is involved, these activities have been excluded from the scope of our Japanese corporate entity).”
Now, in an interview with The Game Business, Harada said he’s interested in how the idea of charging to stream tournaments might evolve.
“If you look at other things such as these events that we have been streaming and people who are participating, whether they’re average streamers or big influencers,” he said, “lots of big companies are coming in and putting money into advertisements for these events, and a lot of influencers are making big money off of their streams.
“But the revenue for our games doesn’t reflect any of this stuff. It’s quite interesting to see how that might change.
“For example, most of the tournaments are licensed for free to people who want to run them or stream them. Occasionally, you’re seeing certain events that pop up where they’re charging pay-per-view, or something like that. Seeing how the money side of this changes, that’s something I’m quite interested in.”
When asked if he was specifically referring to Capcom’s plans to charge for Capcom Cup and SFL World Championship streams, Harada replied: “That’s just one example of many.”
In an update posted last month, Capcom stated that while it was reviewing its pricing it insisted there would still be a price, and pay-per-view tickets were still set to go on sale from November 12 as planned. At the time of writing, however, pay-per-view tickets have still not been listed.
Last month, Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama revealed that he had no idea about the decision to charge players to watch the streams, and that he and producer Shuhei Matsumoto both found out about it while they were at Tokyo Game Show itself.
“Revenue targets and assigned tasks differ fundamentally by department,” Nakayama explained on X. “Even the development team was surprised by this announcement (at least Matsumoto and I were shocked at the venue). That said, since this matter occurred within the same company, we are currently discussing it. We apologize for any concern this may have caused.”
