Street Fighter’s first-ever guest characters in Terry and Mai mark a big shift for the series and potential end of crossover games

After nearly 40 years, Capcom is doing something that hasn’t really happened in Street Fighter before, which is really going to shake things up.

SNK’s Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui were recently announced for Street Fighter 6 as the series’ first true guest characters alongside M. Bison and Elena, bringing with them some big implications for the game and maybe even crossover fighters as a whole — especially holding out hope for Capcom vs. SNK 3.

Now if you want to get really technical, one could argue that Street Fighter has had crossover characters since the Alpha days with the inclusion of Final Fight representatives along with Capcom basically kicking off big fighting game crossovers with X-Men vs. Street Fighter though that’s not really what we’re talking about here.

Instead, we’re referring to the practice of bringing in a guest from outside of Capcom properties to a mainline entry of Street Fighter, which has not been done in a series that dates back to 1987.

Other developers like Bandai Namco and NetherRealm Studios have continued to push that hype that crossover characters can bring to their fighters like Mortal Kombat, Soul Calibur, Injustice and Tekken for well over a decade now while Capcom took a different approach.

They were not against, however, lending out their icons to a handful of other fighting games like Akuma in Tekken 7, Ryu and Chun-Li in Power Rangers Battle for the Grid and of course Ryu and Ken in Super Smash Bros.

Meanwhile, Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 5 made it through their entire lifespans (almost 15 years in total) without bringing in anyone else to try and drive up interest.

Remember when we thought Kyo or Terry might be the last SF5 DLC? It’s not so crazy now

The floodgates are now kinda blown open with not one but two characters coming in one year to SF6 with Terry and Mai where almost anything could be possible now — and the crossover requests will now never cease.

Terry and Mai’s reception has appeared pretty positive and surprising though maybe a bit more mixed than what you’d see for other games, but we’re not really here today to talk about if the guest fighters are good or bad for SF6.

Looking at the wider implications, characters like Tekken’s Reina or Guilty Gear’s Slayer popping up in Season 3 suddenly doesn’t sound so crazy, or perhaps the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will come back as actual DLC fighters instead of just expensive avatar costumes that seemed to mark the shift in Capcom’s approach in the first place.

Now, there’s not only the potential, but also the expectation of more guests in the future combined with how the developers are going to balance them compared to classic Street Fighter characters that are still waiting on the sidelines.

Tekken 8 has avoided that thus far, but Mortal Kombat has shown that genie doesn’t really go back in the bottle once opened.

SNK does make the most sense to partner up with for multiple reasons for this first outing testing the waters with Street Fighter.

They’re the first fighting game devs to join forces for crossover games with Capcom vs. SNK and SNK vs. Capcom games dating back to the late ’90s while there’s also a lot of overlap between the teams currently sharing former staff and / or major fans of each other’s works like SF6 Director Takayuki Nakayama.

Moreover, SNK seems to give out their characters for crossovers than anyone else in fighting games, and they’ve got a big new project to promote themselves with Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.

We did ask SNK’s Yasuyuki Oda about their relationship with Capcom earlier this year, but he remained pretty coy about specifics.

But you’ll of course recognize this is just two characters, not a full new Capcom vs. SNK game like many fans had been wishing for.

Terry and Mai could serve as a potential test bed for a future CvS3, which SNK did express interest in, but we’re seeing this happening now as pointing to having the opposite effect.

This move may have sealed the fate of large crossover projects that used to be much more commonplace.

For a very long time, Capcom stuck to their guns of making crossover fighting games alongside their mainline Street Fighter entries.

With the way the modern gaming industry works, however, that just doesn’t seem like a sustainable or most sensible business decisions.

Although many of them are fan favorites still played to this day, none of Capcom’s crossovers really took the world by storm and made the company money close to what mainline Street Fighter does.

That’s on top of being burned multiple times in their last attempts with Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite and Street Fighter X Tekken failing to live up to expectations while Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and even Marvel vs. Capcom 3 didn’t do enough to move the needle either.

The logistics behind a full-on crossover game are way more complex, multi-layered and intense than they used to, which on top of rising development costs, makes the prospect a tougher business sell than ever.

Licensing has proved time and time again to be a big problem for these titles in the past like the Marvel vs. Capcom de-listings.

Sure Capcom and SNK are on friendly terms again and working together for a few years now, but can you buy Capcom vs. SNK 2 on modern systems? No. How about Tatsunoko? Definitely not.

Hell, we still haven’t even gotten back the original Marvel vs. Capcom titles that were taken down over a decade ago aside from Arcade 1UP machines, and that’s after they did make a whole new game.

The added oversight also takes more of the creative control away from the developers and brings in more hoops they have to jump through to get through an entire roster.

Like many other fighting game studios have found by this point, it seems Capcom is on board with limited guest characters being a much simpler and and easier solution compared to what used to be.

There’s still licensing and oversight to deal with, but it’s on an individual basis that doesn’t inherently limit an entire game’s availability in the future (depending on the deal).

With Terry and Mai’s impending arrival on the stage across from Ryu and Chun, our expectations for a new Capcom vs. SNK game are actually lower than they were before.

We’re not saying it can’t ever happen again, but it now feels like the entire industry has moved on from that ideal where Capcom remained as one of the only holdouts.

Outside of Super Smash Bros., it’s getting harder to imagine fighting game developers taking the risk to build a brand new, large-scale crossover title.

That idea may well be a relic of the past now.