Move over Diablo 4 and Valorant, Street Fighter 6 absolutely dominates Twitch viewership thanks to Japanese VTuber tournament
CEO 2023 just wrapped up where over 1,000 players signed up to compete in Street Fighter 6, but that apparently wasn't the largest event for the game going on this weekend.
Japanese eSports team Crazy Raccoon was also holding their own SF6 tournament in CR Cup, which managed to make the Capcom fighter the most-watched game on Twitch and had viewership that eclipsed what you'd expect to see out of Evo.
The big draw of the CR Cup was the competitors were made up of popular VTubers like Korone as well as professional Valorant and League of Legends players, who were coached by pro fighting game players like BST|Daigo Umehara.
As far as we can tell, the CR Cup made the SF6 section on Twitch cap out at around 313,000 total viewers, and that's not counting the tens of thousands more that were also present on YouTube.
I never imagined a street fighter game would have this much attention almost daily. 🤯 pic.twitter.com/lBUwhkUf9G — Suzi Hunter (@TheSphereHunter) June 25, 2023
For comparison, Street Fighter 5 reached 194,000 viewers on Twitch during Evo 2016, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate hit around 233,000 viewers during Evo 2019.
CEO also brought in strong numbers for SF6 considering it got the Twitch views up to 120,000 for the game and almost 60,000 on the main channel, so it's wild to see how much higher the CR Cup managed to reach.
The appeal is pretty obvious with the genre fanbase crossovers with very popular players and creators outside of the FGC, but we've seen these types of events before — and they never managed to garner this level of interest in the past.
Was this just the right place and right time to catch lightning in a bottle, or does it perhaps show a potential level of general reach that the genre hasn't seen since probably Street Fighter 2?
With numbers like these, it's probably safe to assume there's going to be similar crossover events held in the future like CR Cup, so it's going to be very interesting to see if those type of numbers can be repeated.
We can't say for certain if this broke the all-time viewership records for a single fighting game, but it's damn close if it didn't.
It wouldn't be the first time Street Fighter 6 broke records either, as it previously smashed the concurrent player count on Steam upon release too.
Jiyuna also released a video breaking down what happened with CR Cup and why it blew up so hard, which you can check out below along with some of the tournament matches of Korone with subtitles thanks to JShay Translations.
Source: EventHubs
