Street Fighter 5 in-game ads spark vociferous debate

In-game advertisements hit Street Fighter 5 next week, Capcom has announced.

This sponsored content, as Capcom calls it, arrives on 11th December. It'll be displayed in several locations in-game "to remind you about costumes, bundles and the Capcom Pro Tour," Capcom said in a blog post.

You can turn the in-game ads off, but to encourage players to keep them on, you get extra Fight Money in ranked and casual matches when you have sponsored content enabled.

Here's how it works: every character has an "ad style" costume where the sponsored content will appear somewhere on their clothing or model. In the example provided by the below image, we see adverts for the Capcom Pro Tour on Ryu and Balrog's gloves and clothes.

A sponsor will also appear in the versus screen before a battle. These loading ads will not affect loading screen times, Capcom stressed.

And finally, there are stage ads. Some tournament stages feature a sponsor, like the Ring of Power stage. It looks like this:

As mentioned, you can turn the in-game ads off. To do this, go into Battle Settings.

Reaction to the news among the Street Fighter community has been mixed. "It doesn't matter that they can be disabled," wrote redditor Legendary_motives in a post on r/StreetFighter.

"It's wrong to incentivise your users to expose themselves to ads in a game they payed [sic] full money for, on top of DLC, in order to earn Fight Money at a rate they were two years ago before the nerf."

There is also concern the in-game ads will expand to include promos for the likes of RedBull and other Capcom Pro Tour sponsors. As you'd expect, the Street Fighter community has already started taking the piss out of Capcom for the in-game ads with images such as the below:

"It sacrifices the integrity of the characters," Legendary_motives continued. "If there was any evidence that Capcom doesn't give a shit about a brand anymore, them destroying icons like Ryu with tacky Nascar logos is it. These screenshots look terrible, I can only see it being worse when they hotswap these icons with things that fit even less so. Payed $5 for a skin? Splat have a cup of noodles on it."

Others, though, have pointed to the fact you can turn the in-game ads off. "I would rather go to Tekken or Fightcade than play Street Fighter with ads on, but if you can just turn them off then it's a non-issue to me," wrote redditor defeattheenemy.

And others are employing a wait and see approach. In the same blog post, Capcom said it plans to adjust the difficulty, the number of plays and the rewards for the Extra battle Challenges on 11th December. It'll be interesting to see how Fight Money gained from Extra Battle Challenges is affected in the context of the bonus Fight Money offered by enabling in-game ads.