Street Fighter 6 Is Going the Way of Smash — The Structural Path of the Crossover Fighting Game

The Day Sonic and Snake Arrived

In 2007, Masahiro Sakurai ran a daily update blog called the Smash Bros. DOJO!!. Anyone who checked that site every morning will remember the moment Sonic the Hedgehog's inclusion was announced.

This was a Sega character. The character from the company that had spent years as Nintendo's main rival. Snake from Metal Gear Solid, a Konami franchise, was also confirmed. Something shifted. A character reveal stopped being "game news" and started becoming an event. Out of everyone who watched the Sonic announcement, how many actually owned a Wii? It didn't matter. A pattern emerged: consuming a reveal without buying the game. Watching the trailer as its own thing.

In the Wii U and 3DS generation (2014), Mega Man from Capcom, Pac-Man from Bandai Namco, Cloud from Square Enix, and Bayonetta from Sega followed. Something easy to miss happened in there: Ryu from Street Fighter joined Smash Bros. A Street Fighter character was in Smash. It felt like a footnote at the time.

Ultimate and the Business Model It Completed

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launched in 2018 with the tagline "Everyone is here."¹ Two rounds of Fighter Pass DLC followed: Joker from Persona 5, the Dragon Quest Hero, Banjo-Kazooie, Terry Bogard from SNK, Byleth from Fire Emblem Three Houses, Min Min from ARMS, Steve from Minecraft, Sephiroth, Pyra and Mythra from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Kazuya Mishima from Tekken, and Sora from Kingdom Hearts.

Each reveal had already become something separate from the game itself. The Sephiroth reveal was edited like a film teaser. When Sora's inclusion was announced, it became news outside gaming media — Disney had allowed a character into Smash Bros. Character reveal trailers were moving on YouTube and social media through entirely different circuits than game sales.

"Who's next?" had become one of the central axes around which Smash Bros was discussed.

The Day Terry Bogard Came to SF6

In 2024, Terry Bogard was announced as a Year 2 DLC character for Street Fighter 6.²

Terry is the protagonist of SNK's Fatal Fury series and a central figure in The King of Fighters. He is not a Capcom character. In the fighting game world, SNK and Capcom have long run parallel — competing franchises in the same genre, with their own distinct communities of longtime players.

When the announcement landed, what happened? KOF fans and Fatal Fury fans watched an SF6 trailer. People who don't regularly follow Street Fighter flowed in from SNK-adjacent hashtags on X. The trending topics carried both "SF6" and "Terry" at the same time. Shortly after, Mai Shiranui was confirmed as the next DLC addition — also SNK — making it clear this was a deliberate direction, not a one-off.³

Looking back at Year 1 DLC: Rashid, A.K.I., Ed, Akuma. All Capcom, all Street Fighter universe. The door to outside IP opened at Year 2. The structural echo of Smash Bros opening its doors to Sonic and Snake in 2008 is hard to miss.

What "Going the Way of Smash" Actually Means

The phrase isn't a value judgment here. It describes a structure. Three axes help define it.

The first is the content-ification of reveal trailers. People who don't play the game consume the trailer. The announcement stops being a preview for a product and becomes a self-contained piece of content. The SF6 Terry trailer circulated through SNK communities as its own object — the way he moved, the soundtrack choices, the moment of recognition for longtime Fatal Fury fans. The game's marketing lives outside the game.

The second is roster discussion becoming the game's center of gravity. "Who's next?" generates more heat than gameplay analysis or system updates. This is recognizable from the later period of Smash Bros Ultimate, where even dedicated competitive players spent significant attention on DLC character speculation. The same dynamic is beginning in SF6, with Reddit threads and fighting game communities cataloguing hints, code names, and odds on which IPs or companies might send a character next.

The third is the temporary convergence of separate communities. The Sora announcement in Smash brought Kingdom Hearts fans into the same space as Smash players for a moment. Terry's announcement in SF6 brought SNK communities into contact with the Capcom fighting game world. The convergence is brief — most people watch the trailer and return to their usual spaces. But a trace remains. SF6 registers in communities that had not previously tracked it.

The Wider Industry

SF6 is not doing this alone. The same structural move is running across the industry.

Tekken 8 added Clive Rosfield from Final Fantasy XVI in 2024.⁴ Final Fantasy players watched a Tekken trailer. People who had never paid attention to Tekken showed up in the comments. The mechanics of crossover-driven hype operated the same way.

The Mortal Kombat series has been doing this longer than anyone in the genre. Freddy Krueger, the Terminator, RoboCop, the Joker — guest characters have been part of MK's identity since at least MK9.⁵ MK's pattern, though, has a consistency to it: the guests are horror and action-cinema icons, and they fit within the game's own identity as a violent, cinematic spectacle. There is coherence to the crossover.

What makes SF6 and Smash the closer comparison is that SNK characters are fighting game characters. Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui are not bringing a completely alien vocabulary into SF6 — they come from the same genre tradition. This is different from MK bringing in a Terminator. SF6 and KOF have long existed in the same genre as rivals. Their characters meeting in SF6's arena is closer to a genre summit than a genre collision.

The underlying economics are consistent across all of these: digital distribution has made single-character DLC viable, and character reveal trailers function as marketing content that costs little to distribute but can reach far beyond the existing fanbase. The game as platform, characters as recurring content drops — this model sustains a live-service structure after the initial launch.

What Happened After Smash Went That Way

Smash Bros did not emerge from this structural shift without questions.

The question "what kind of game is Smash?" came up repeatedly in its community. Is it a party game? A competitive fighting game? A museum of game history? The presence of Minecraft Steve and Sephiroth in the same roster made the answer harder, not easier. Whether Smash should appear at EVO has been a recurring point of discussion; Ultimate has appeared in some years and not others.⁶ The game's identity became genuinely difficult to state simply.

The answer the Smash community eventually settled around was something like: Smash is Smash. Whatever IP enters the roster, it moves through Smash's framework. Steve and Sephiroth both play as Smash fighters. The game has its own identity strong enough to absorb the characters that pass through it. That absorptive capacity is what held the franchise together.

SF6 is earlier in the same trajectory. Year 2 has opened the door to outside IP, but Ryu, Chun-Li, Ken, and the core of the Street Fighter universe remain the center of the game. The structural logic of the announcements has already shifted to match what Smash built — trailers as events, roster speculation as discourse, community convergence as a byproduct of each reveal. But the question of what SF6 fundamentally is has not arrived in force yet.

It may not arrive on a clear schedule. It arrived for Smash gradually, over several iterations, as the ratio of third-party characters grew. If SF6 continues in this direction across Year 3 and beyond, the question will come. Not as a crisis, probably. More as the kind of steady recalibration that happens when a game's identity expands faster than its community's description of it.

The game itself may not change dramatically. What is already changing is the shape of how SF6 is talked about, and where it travels.