But that’s not a bad thing
Inside a video game industry where many large publishers are struggling, Capcom is not falling into the same slump, but is instead trucking forward with hit after hit.
Resident Evil Requiem launched last week to nearly-universal critical and fan praise, and its sales success serves as a reminder of the drop in the bucket that fighting games are in the grand scheme of things (and why that’s not a problem in itself).
Capcom announced today that Resident Evil Requiem already hit 5 million copies sold in a matter of five days.
This was enough to make it the fastest-selling release in Resident Evil’s history where the Resident Evil 2 remake sold 3 million copies in its first week for comparison.
That also means Requiem was almost able to match Street Fighter 6’s lifetime sales of 6.36 million units in a matter of days.
It took Street Fighter 6 two full years to reach 5 million copies while RE9 did it in five days, but that doesn’t mean the fighting game is anywhere near a failure at all.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite with Street Fighter 6 being the best-selling and most popular fighting game around (that’s still receiving support at least).
The current game is more than doubling the sales pace of its predecessor, Street Fighter 5, and Capcom themselves seem pretty darn pleased with SF6’s continued performance since its often highlighted in their business reports favorably.
We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the over five million players who braved the horrors of Resident Evil Requiem. Thank you for 30 years of support. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/KbzXAnsEII
— Resident Evil (@RE_Games) March 4, 2026
This just serves as a reminder to everyone that Street Fighter is not Resident Evil — and that’s perfectly fine.
It’s the niche that fighting games have pretty much always found themselves in after the Street Fighter 2 boom started to fizzle in the ’90s.
I know the headline and front-facing premise of this story makes you want to compare the two games from Capcom, but the real point is they don’t compare apples to apples.
Fighting games function on their own axis like they have for decades, and it’ll probably continue to be that way.
Street Fighter will presumably never beat Monster Hunter or Resident Evil in terms of raw sales, and they don’t need to.
What is important is that publishers (and fans) have appropriate expectations for what they’re making and not try to force themselves into something that they are not.
Capcom had to learn this hard lesson before over 15 years ago already, but it still took time to drill that into their heads.
Devil May Cry 4, for example, was the best-selling game in the franchise when it released, but that still wasn’t enough to meet Capcom’s expectations at the time.
So they tried rebooting Devil May Cry for what they hoped would be to more widespread appeal, and then that game sold worse and turned off many of the original fans in the process.
We have an even more recent example in fighting games too.
Mortal Kombat 1 was the highest-selling fighting game this generation since it hit 6.2 million copies as of last August.
Despite what should have been considered a success by pretty much any other fighting game publisher, Warner Bros. seemingly pulled the plug early on Mortal Kombat 1 anyway after only a year and a half, so somebody’s math was not adding up — and it probably wasn’t the developers themselves.
So between similar sales numbers, Capcom sees a healthy success while Warner Bros. saw an underwhelming performance.
The only fighters that typically breach the wider general audience are Super Smash Bros. and Mortal Kombat where we can see that even the latter is not free from the shackles of unrealistic expectations.
Trying to force fighting games to be what they are not is a recipe for disaster that is set up to leave everyone unhappy.
The SNK World Championship is offering up millions of dollars in prize pools, but you don’t see thousands or millions of people flocking to Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves and The King of Fighters 15 because of the money or the marketing.
Corporations are always chasing the highest dollar and largest growth, but Capcom at least seems to have wizened up better to what each of their games can realistically do whether that be Resident Evil, Street Fighter, or Mega Man — which has been working well for them nearly across the board and reaching higher sales over time across multiple games and series.
That means, however, we also have to accept the fact that Street Fighter is never going to be Capcom’s highest priority, though it’s obviously still important to them too.
We even recently discussed Capcom’s apparent moving of Street Fighter 6 talent over to the Monster Hunter team to show the levels of priority at the company.
This doesn’t mean that things can’t improve or can’t grow, but they have to be done more organically and in ways that people are actually interested in.
The best way to truly grow the fighting game community is still to show your friends the cool stuff and what you love about your favorites to see if the hook can grab them too.
Big numbers don’t make fighting games special.
The people sitting on the Player 2 side do.