Capcom only needs to make one change to make the Street Fighter 6 Battle Pass way more attractive

When you really take a step back and think about it, Street Fighter it’s really one of the first games as a service. Sure, back in the ’90s it meant something different, but few games ‘lived’ as long as Street Fighter titles, receiving updates that offered new moves, new characters, balance changes, and even entirely new gameplay mechanics.

In those days, you had to buy a new cart or wait for a new board to drop at your local arcade cabinet. In many ways, Capcom was ahead of the game, as now all competitive titles have their lives extended through a smooth trickle-feed of additional content. Street Fighter hasn’t moved into this space so much as just adjusted the cadence of what it was already doing to fit the trends.

So with Street Fighter 6, the characters aren’t delivered with one big update, but instead will appear one by one throughout the year. Rashid arrives first, later this month. And in one area, SF6 rises more directly from current trends: the Battle Pass.

You all know the concept of this by now, and it’s unlikely you’ll need me to explain it. The Battle Pass is exactly what you’d expect; divided into free and premium tiers, with a variety of rewards available for each pass. Playing SF6 rewards you with experience points that accumulate in the pass and unlocks cool extras.

These extras mostly consist of basic customization stuff. That includes items for your avatar character to use in Battle Hub, World Tour, and Avatar Battles, Titles, Backgrounds, and Poses to use on your profile, and additional stickers and frames that can be used in SF6’s photo mode.

It’s all relatively inconsequential stuff, which I actually think is okay. Each Battle Pass is an optional purchase for the diehards, it never contains anything momentous, but the goodies everyone can get are decent enough. The pass is also quite generous in the way it can be earned: it’s available in almost every mode, which means that even online matches against friends or the CPU contribute towards completing the pass. Even playing a few matches a day casually, you can easily knock out a full completion of a pass in a week so far.

However, there are a couple more Battle Pass rewards that are more substantial. Later levels of the Premium Tier reward you with Fighter Coins, the currency that can be used to buy some of SF6’s biggest DLC, like costumes and character colors. Every Premium Pass so far contains a classic Capcom game that you can launch and play through the SF6 menus. And then… there’s the music.

Music, dear reader, is what this article is about. Classical Street Fighter music unlocks are included in both Battle Passes so far. The first pass offered a couple of Street Fighter 2 tunes; the second offers unlocks for some Street Fighter 5 character themes to welcome Rashid, who of course hails from that game. But this music… is it a bit useless?

Ultimately, the music is designed to be played through a sort of Jukebox MP3 player within SF6’s menus, but isn’t actually supported by the game itself. And this feels like a huge missed opportunity.

The Street Fighter 6 soundtrack is great. It’s brave and different in the way it does away with classic character themes from the past and gives even the classic heroes new themes to represent their changing lives. But that presents Capcom with a great opportunity. I love new tracks, but I would also love to have the old ones in the mix.

The game is already set up for this; you can choose from the menus which songs you would like to hear in which scenarios; scenic themes, character themes, etc. More options (or more options for random selection) would be a good thing. It’s absurd to me, for example, that the first Battle Pass included music unlocks for classic SF2 tracks by Dee Jay, Cammy, and T. Hawk, but they can’t be selected to play when fighting those characters. Yeah, old Hawk isn’t in the game, but his ward Lily is. She could inherit the theme from him.

At this time, the music that is unlocked in Battle Pass, which should be noted that they are Premium tier exclusives, is of no use to me. I will never go into the menus to listen to these tracks. Especially not when Capcom is pretty good with making soundtracks available on Spotify anyway. These unlocks are meaningless. Make them playable in battle though… and they’ll become a big problem.

Hopefully this is the plan. But to be honest, it worries me. Street Fighter 5 offered a single piece of music DLC, an unlock of classic Street Fighter 2 tracks for battle, and then never followed up with music from later games. When Arcade Edition added a proper Arcade Mode, complete with some really special remixes of the older game themes, the massive open goal of allowing these themes to be used in other modes was simply ignored. The music honestly felt like it was an afterthought.

Anyway. If Capcom wants you to buy these premium battle passes, you need to make sure the deal is a good one. Many fans beg for real character costumes to be included in these passes instead of avatar gear. And while I understand that, I also absolutely see why Capcom won’t necessarily do that. Costumes are an absolute cash cow for these games. But I don’t see why one of the more exclusive cosmetic unlocks is so useless so far – music unlocks should be better utilized. Thoughtful changes like this by Capcom will make me open my wallet.