As you wander the wasteland of Appalachia, you may notice what looks like an oddly dressed ghoul stumbling down the cracked pavement toward you. It’s actually a Scorched, which isn’t anything special, but lately you might’ve seen them dressed in holiday attire. The bright red and white frock of a Scorched Wanderer stands out in the bleak post-apocalypse, and if you manage to beat your fellow survivors to the punch, you can actually farm Holiday Scorched in Fallout 76 for fantastic rewards. Why would you want to? Well, read on. – Brandon Morgan Read More
The dust seems to have mostly settled on the Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar rap beef (for now), but the musical back and forth between the two hip-hop titans has imprinted itself on pop culture. That imprint includes video game mods, as a Mortal Kombat 1fan has recently recreated both rappers in the game to pit them against each other. You can check out a match using the mod below, but spoilers, it ends the same way the real-world beef did: Kendrick won.
How Invincible’s Omni-Man Joined Mortal Kombat 1
The mod by NegativeZoneNerd is up on Nexus Mods as Def Jam MK1 Pack 1 – Kendrick VS Drake, a reference to the Def Jam fighting game series starring different rappers and hip-hop artists from the mid-2000s. The series has been dormant since 2007, so fans haven’t been able to pit a lot of modern rappers against one another in a fighting game. But this Mortal Kombat 1 mod is a decent enough substitute. The Def Jam MK1 Pack has two options to play as Lamar, one makes the “Not Like Us” rapper a skin for Reiko, and the other lets you play as him as a skin for Kung Lao. Drake, meanwhile, is a skin for Johnny Cage.
The Drake vs. Kendrick beef has been entertaining to watch unfold and I don’t think I’ve ever seen people be so unified online. Though it seems both of them have stopped dropping songs about each other for now, it was easily one of the most significant pop culture moments of 2024, even though it’s only May. People love to watch others be haters. I now understand why they held gladiator matches in ancient Rome. Mortal Kombat 1 mods aren’t those, but the fighting game is brutal enough that it gives you a modicum of the same adrenaline rush.
If you thought that Excel spreadsheets were just for mind-numbing office work, think again. A gaming hobbyist has created an Excel-based RPG game that he based on the popular post-apocalyptic game Fallout. It’s the end of the world, all over again.
Will the Fallout TV Series Radiate the Tone of the Video Games?
How do you turn spreadsheet software into a video game? Don’t ask me because I have less than zero idea. That said, the game’s creator, YouTuber “Dynamic Pear,” has offered a quick tutorial on how to use his weird, makeshift game that was developed via everybody’s least favorite office software.
On his website, “Pear” gives a brief description of the game’s story like so:
It is the 145th year of the second age. Life in Mercer is unrecognisable to that which came earlier – The bombs saw to that. Humanity may never fully recover…Adventure beckons once more, and you are ready to answer its call!
The YouTuber explains that his game has two components: “Mapping and Questing” and “Battling.” You can move through the various areas of the bombed-out RPG environment…
Screenshot: YouTube/Dynamic Pear
…or you can duel with the various characters you encounter along the way.
Screenshot: YouTube/Dynamic Pear
The website also offers more details about the various quirks of the gameplay and includes a link where you can download the game.
The inspiration behind this creation, Fallout, is a popular post-apocalyptic video game that takes place after a nuclear war. The first version of it was originally released in 1997 and was playable on Mac, Windows, and MS-DOS. It was originally spawned by a previous 1988 game, dubbed Wasteland. Since then, there have been four sequels and a number of spinoffs. But the big reason we’re seeing this now is that the Amazon Prime Video TV series based on the games has exploded in popularity and inspired people to head back to the experiences that started it all. In this case, someone made a new experience just for you.
Anyway, if you’re looking to make your workday slightly more interesting and you don’t have access to the Eggman Game, my suggestion would be to check out Dynamic Pear’s interesting creation. It’s probably the most fun you’ll ever have with spreadsheets.
Video game publisher Activision Blizzard has been embroiled in controversy within the last few years, from allegations that a culture of sexual harassment was allowed to thrive to reports of union-busting by management. But in January 2024, when a new lawsuit was filed against the Call of Duty and Overwatch publisher, many were shocked to read what it was in reference to: A 57-year-old former ActiBlizz exec alleged that he left the company because of ageism. According to the lawsuit, then-CEO Bobby Kotick said that the company’s problem was that there were “too many old white guys” working there.
Though race and gender traditionally get more attention in calls for a more diverse game industry—one where whiteness and maleness remain the norm—age discrimination is a hot-button issue as well. According to a 2019 survey from the International Game Developers Association, only 9% of game developers are 50 years old or older. As the people behind iconic, genre-defining games approach and surpass middle age, how do their peers treat them? Have they noticed a shift in the way developers work, or how games are made?
I sat down with Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinksi on one call and Ultima Underworld creator Warren Spector, Apogee Software founder Scott Miller, and Nightdive Studios head of business development Larry Kuperman on another, to chat about navigating the game world after spending decades in it.
Photo: Mark Davis (Getty Images)
The demands of game development
“I’m gonna go on record saying I think I’m the oldest person who isn’t running stuff or on the business side,” Spector, who is 68, proclaims early on in the conversation. He’s referencing the phenomenon by which former developers transition to the business side of game dev, which many chalk up to the intense demands of video game development cycles.
Spector started in the board game world before moving to digital games in 1989, Miller (who pioneered gaming’s episodic release format) shipped his first in ‘85, Kuperman has been involved in games since 2001, and Bleszinski joined Epic Games in ‘92. Of the four, Spector is the only one solely working on the development side, while the rest are now mostly focused on the business end or, in Bleszinski’s case, out of games almost entirely.
I ask if the volatility and demands of the industry, which has seen more than 6,000 layoffs in the first month of 2024 alone, are why companies can’t or won’t retain older talent. “Some people find an ever-changing environment invigorating,” Spector suggests. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve lasted this long…things change so rapidly that you’re constantly acquiring not only new knowledge but new skills.”
But he acknowledges how competitive and tough the games industry can be. “The difficulty of the work, the low pay, drives even young developers away,” he points out while suggesting that, in his experience, the average “lifespan” of a programmer is about five to seven years due to the intense nature of their work.
“There’s a certain type of developer that’s a kind of self-flagellating monk that lives for that [intense] work ethic,” Bleszinski says during our conversation. “And then there’s a certain amount of peer pressure where you have deadlines and then someone goes home at six o’clock at night to their family, and then the other people are still at their desks—they don’t say it, but deep down they’re thinking, ‘I’m gonna be here until midnight, fuck that guy.’ A lot of that comes from the top…my producer on Gears, Rod Ferguson, I believe is one of the best in the business, but he lives for the work. He’s just an absolute workaholic.”
With crunch becoming an increasingly popular issue within the industry, and workers campaigning for union protections and a better work/life balance, can studios expect their developers to work the way they once did?
“The industry thrives on hungry game developers that are just happy to get an okay salary and free Mountain Dew and Doritos,” Bleszinski says. “If crunch is enforced, they’ll do it, but they’re gonna be very resentful towards the company…plus you get to a certain age where you hit the point where you’re like, ‘fuck you, pay me’.”
Image: Apogee Entertainment
The promise of indies, the problem of layoffs
Though Spector, Miller, and Kuperman don’t hesitate to disagree on the topics we cover (they playfully throw barbs about the validity of the games-as-a-service business model), they wholeheartedly agree on one thing: The nuts and bolts of game development have dramatically shifted since they started their careers, and much of that shift can be attributed to the availability and approachability of today’s game engines.
“We used to have to create engines from scratch, and that limited access,” Spector points out. “Now, youngsters right out of school, in their garage, can actually make games without learning Assembly, like Richard Garriot [the creator of the Ultima series] had to. So I think that’s a large reason why you don’t see as many older developers, because the youngsters are using those available tools.”
Miller, who is still “deeply involved” in making games, concurs: “We’re in the era now where two people can do what 20 people did back in the ‘90s.” He brings up last year’s action game, Turbo Overkill, which Apogee published. “95% of that game was made by one guy. We helped him up with the music and voiceover, but this is a game that would’ve taken 25 to 30 people back in the ‘90s. It’s just a remarkable piece of work.”
And for them, in today’s game economy, innovation like that can only be found at indie studios. “I like being at the indie level,” Miller says. “I think we can all agree on that,” Kuperman chimes in. “There’s just so much innovation going on at the indie level that you’re not seeing at the big boy level because it’s too costly to take a risk,” Miller suggests.
What about those “big boy” studios, and the thousands of layoffs they’ve doled out in the last month alone? How do industry mainstays feel about the layoffs, and the future of the industry? For Spector, there’s no fear in gaming’s future, just apprehension towards those leading it: “It sounds like [companies] just over-hired during the early days of the pandemic, and it’s bad management that’s resulting in overstaffing. That doesn’t mean there’s a fundamental flaw. It means we have some bad managers at the top of companies.”
Kuperman steps in, pointing out that “Scott [Miller] has been kinda leading the way in hiring back up people from kindred companies.” Miller reiterated Spector’s talking points, suggesting that “games suddenly were selling 30 to 50% better than normal” during covid, and studios went on a hiring spree.
The conversation circles back around, once again, to the promise and allure of indie studios in the modern financial climate. “I don’t have 150 or 200 employees to lay off…but the layoffs are coming at Mega Corp,” Kuperman says. “And in the meantime, there are lots of indie developers that are not only thriving, but are looking to scale up.”
Variety
Ageism and diversity in the video game industry
Though we laugh a bit about how we all came together—thanks to Bobby Kotick (himself a 61-year-old man) allegedly partaking in ageism—the tone does get somewhat serious when discussing the issue of age discrimination. Miller and Spector deny facing any sort of ageism during their decades in the industry, but Kuperman has a personal anecdote that’s stayed with him for years.
After working remotely for GameStop for two years as a business development manager, he was let go at 57 years old. “There I was, with a great resume, you know, successful in games, I had worked with every major company, my client list went from Activision to Zenimax…I sent out my resume, my applications to all of these companies that I had worked with—they all knew what I could do and my capabilities. And they all turned me down,” Kuperman recalls. “And the one that was the most offensive—I won’t say who it was—but they took the time to explain to me that I was not a ‘cultural fit.’ I got this explanation that I was not a cultural fit while I was working from home wearing a Ramones T-shirt. I knew what they meant, right? That I was not gonna fit in with their twenty- and thirty-somethings.”
Bleszinski believes older members of the industry are still in it either because they didn’t get “fuck you” money or because they genuinely love what they do—from our convo, it’s clear that his time churning out AAA games left him somewhat jaded. “Talking about ageism—once a person gets married and has kids and whatnot, you know, they’re going to put in their eight hours and they’re gonna go the fuck home,” Bleszinski says. “I tell people, get ‘fuck you’ money, and then get the fuck out.”
Spector, Miller, and Kuperman are all now indie darlings, so their experience is vastly different from Bleszinski’s, who had to be the face of a massive AAA franchise while still actively working on it. But all of them still agree that game development can often feel like a young person’s, well, game. Part of that has to do with the demands of the work, sure, but there’s an accessibility problem, as well.
“My twitch skills are not what they used to be,” Spector points out. “People don’t believe me that there are physical changes in your body as you get older. But there are, and I am physically not able to work the kinds of hours I used to. I am physically not able to keep up with 12-year-olds, 34-year-olds [referencing my age] playing games anymore. So I need to find a somewhat different role in development, and I’m lucky enough that I’ve been able to carve out a different role. But a lot of people might just say, ‘I don’t want to do that anymore’ and self-select out.”
Image: Naughty Dog
“The thing is, for me, my vision,” Kuperman says. He struggles with contrast in games, and can get frustrated when he can’t see important features like doors. “But I’m lucky because [my studio] NightDive is now part of Atari, so I now have support mechanisms that I didn’t have before.”
But how does the industry, as a whole, do when it comes to accessibility and diversity?
“It’s not just age and it’s not just physical—divergent thinking is not very well-supported,” Spector says. “Every way you can think about diversity, we do a bad job…we don’t get a lot of resumes from older developers or people who think differently or people of color…that’s an area where I think younger developers are going to have to lead the charge.”
He continues. “I’m only speaking for myself but, I like the past when I was able to work until three in the morning and sleep under my desk and drive home and have no idea how I got home. I kind of miss those days of comradery in the foxhole. Younger developers don’t wanna do that, and it’s a good thing ‘cause I can’t do it anymore. So it’s good that they’re thinking that way…the world has changed for the better.”
Think the first week of January is a slow one for news? Think again. A 13-year-old Tetris phenom has boldly gone where no one has gone before, beating the NES version of the classic puzzler by reaching a “kill screen” on level 157. Steam announced the occasionally baffling results of its annual players’ choice awards, and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall got a free-to-play, fan-made remaster.
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Before Starfield, before Skyrim, before Fallout 3 and Oblivion, before your parents even knew how to make you, there was The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. It was, and remains, Bethesda’s biggest-ever game, and now a fan-made rebuilding of the entire vast world in Unity has reached its 1.0 release. Oh, and it’s entirely free, and won’t be destroyed by lawyers! This new Daggerfall is an almighty achievement, and exactly the excuse you needed to return to Tamriel. – John Walker Read More
The results of 2023’s Steam Awards are in. Each year, Steam turns to the community to vote on the year’s best games across a wide variety of categories. This year saw Larian Studios’ RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 grab game of the year, while Lethal Company, a first-person cooperative horror game,got the “Better With Friends Award” for its co-op gameplay. The Last of Us Part I snagged Best Soundtrack, which seems odd because it came out in 2013, but it technically wasn’t added to Steam until 2023. – Claire Jackson Read More
Just two months after the third-person action-horror game Stray Souls came out, developer Jukai Studio abruptly shuttered its doors, citing myriad issues including poor game sales and multiple cyberattacks from an unknown perpetrator.The developer took to X/Twitter on December 22 to announce the sudden closure. Part of the problem, Jukai Studio said, was Stray Souls’ abysmal reception and sales, which made the team “completely unable to sustain the company.” – Levi Winslow Read More
Classic puzzle game Tetris has been around for over three decades, and in that time, plenty of people have reached its various endings, usually by clearing four rows of bricks at once like a digital demolitioner. That’s a challenge in and of itself, but now, someone has taken the concept of “beating Tetris” to the extreme by playing the NES game so hard it straight-up crashed, a phenomenon also known as the “kill screen.” – Levi Winslow Read More
Forever-in-development space sim Star Citizenmight not be finished after over a decade of dev work and announcements, but it does already contain a lot of expensive ships you can buy and fly around in. And if you want all of those ships in one big DLC pack, Star Citizen has an option for you. Just be prepared to spend over $48,000. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
Here’s something unironically wonderful. Via a post by Larian Studios writer Rachel Quirke, we’ve just learned of a deeply moving tribute to a player’s father that appears in the studios’ award-winning RPG Baldur’s Gate 3. In October 2020, a member of the Larian forums posted to thank the developer for releasing the first act of the game in Early Access, because it allowed them to enjoy one last adventure with their father, who had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. – John Walker Read More
Screenshot: Ubisoft Massive Entertainment / Kotaku
Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft’s upcoming action-adventure game that follows scoundrel Kay Vess between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, previously had no release date beyond a very broad “2024” window. Today, however, a Disney Parks blog post quietly announced that it would launch in “late 2024.” This didn’t last long, as Ubisoft promptly swooped in to correct the record and re-assert the general 2024 timeframe. – Levi Winslow Read More
City of Heroes was a beloved MMORPG that launched in April 2004 and lasted just over eight years. In that time it won a dedicated community of players who, even after the game died, kept playing the MMO via private servers that existed in a weird legal gray area. But now, the developers behind City of Heroes have given one private server the official thumbs-up to keep on keeping on. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
Doom is still a very good first-person shooter, even if it’s nearly 30 years old. But that first, world-changing chapter did lack something that its predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D, had plenty of—Nazi killin’. Thankfully a new total conversion mod for Doom, called Venturous,has fixed this and in the process created a whole Indiana Jones-inspired game.
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Released all the way back in 1993, the original Doom from id Software was a big step forward for video game technology and also helped popularize the first-person shooter genre. Even today, three decades later, people are still playing and modding Doomand all of its sequels. So it’s not shocking that in 2023 someone has spent a lot of time on a brand-new total conversion mod for the original Doom that turns the game into a Nazi killin’ adventure that sees you spanning the globe as you look for the lost city of Atlantis.
Venturous, developed by PixelFox, came out earlier this month but in the last week has become more popular as folks have discovered this rad adventure-themed GZDoom mod. I just came across it today and ended up getting distracted for about an hour playing it instead of doing my job and writing about it.
Pagb666 / id Software
What immediately stood out to me about Venturous is how heavy guns feel. Even the starting pistol is no peashooter and can take down rooms of Nazis in a few seconds. I also like how the mod plays around with darkness, especially in the first level. You have to use a torch to see in some areas. And you can only hold the torch while using the pistol, which has limited ammo, forcing you to sometimes fight in the dark if you run out of handgun bullets. However, you can also toss the torch to light up areas and make combat easier in these dark hallways. Or you can even chuck the flaming torch at enemies and set them on fire.
The mod has seven maps split across three areas with each map featuring new weapons and enemies. I especially love the MP40 SMG as it sounds menacing and does a lot of damage very quickly. The new lever action shotgun is also just as good and dangerous as any shotgun found in official id Software shooters.
Developer PixelFox—who had only created two maps before this massive project—explained that they made this mod because they wanted to play an “Indiana Jones-style adventure” in a retro shooter engine. So after a year of learning how to create something like a total conversion mod pack, PixelFox has finished Venturous.
You can download and check out Venturous yourself for free. Just a heads up before you hop in: You’ll need to download and install GZDoom and get that all set up first, and this particular total conversion requires the data file from the original Doom, not Doom II. But once you have that sorted, you’ll be able to enjoy this mod and three decades’ worth of other cool stuff, too.
Fighting game reboot Mortal Kombat 1, which got a paid Early Access release September 14, introduces a completely new, single-player board game mode called Invasion. According to a PlayStation blog explaining the mode, the expansive Invasion mode serves as a kind of pinnacle to the 31-year-old series’ history of varied single-player formats. Well, maybe it could have, if only some reviewers didn’t find it so boring.
Unboxing The Baldur’s Gate 3 Collector’s Edition
What is Mortal Kombat 1’s Invasion mode?
Invasion, which becomes accessible after you roll credits on the game’s single-player story mode, is “an evolution,” PlayStation says, of preexisting features like the storefront Krypt from 2002 game Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance and single-player battle Towers. In it, you protect your reality from invaders by battling them “on board game-like world maps,” PlayStation says, in exchange for rewards like in-game money and cosmetics.
“Anyone can enjoy Invasion,” PlayStation writes, “but longtime fighting game fans […] will probably find a second home here. While the main incentive is scoring unlockables to personalize your favorite fighters, there’s much to enjoy.”
A single-player mode that takes inspiration from board games sounds like it could be quite novel, bringing something fresh and exciting to MK1’s single-player offerings. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. IGN’s Mitchell Saltzman found it overwhelming, saying:
It’s a mishmash of ideas that sound good on paper but, unfortunately, tries to be a few too many things all at once. Almost every invasion “board” is made up of a series of spaces that each have a themed fight assigned to them […]. You move around the board conducting an exhausting grind of clearing repetitive battles against enemies that—at least for the first several hours—don’t put up much of a fight, collecting a slower-than-usual drip of worthwhile rewards, finding keys to unlock gates, and completing challenges like [classic fight interlude] Test Your Might or survival minigames, until you reach the end.
VG247 staff writer Connor Makar agreed in his review, calling the mode “largely unexciting.”
“It has its moments with secret missions and good ‘ol Test Your Might challenges spread around,” he said, “but these perks were countered by modifiers that did more to frustrate than exhilarate. A missile from off-screen may be funny on occasion, but a super-armored katana running at you, over and over again, begins to grate.”
Is there any benefit to MK1 Invasion mode?
Those categorizations might not inspire much confidence in Invasion, but cosmetics fiends should familiarize themselves with it anyway—it’s where MK1’s future seasonal content, which will not involve any microtransactions or a battle pass, can be found.
So you can keep your money; you’ll pay up by enduring potentially sleepy gameplay. But, who knows, you might find Invasions not-so-sleepy. In its review, Bloody Disgusting said Invasions “is a massive improvement over the previous game’s Krypt, feeling less random and cryptic in how to overcome obstacles.”
“With Netherrealm promising to seasonally update the Invasions mode, I can’t wait to see what surprises and themes are in store for us,” said writer Reyna Cervantes.
In any case, Invasions makes sense living in Mortal Kombat 1, a game that wants to strike a clean balance between the decades-old and new. Test it out yourself when the game comes out globally on September 19.
There are, by my count, 1732 indie games coming out every day now, which makes promoting them (for devs) and covering them (for us) almost impossible. One trend I’ve enjoyed lately, though, is an attempt to market a game not just by showing the game, but by showing what went into making the game.
This Wacky Magical Girl Anime Is Studio Trigger-Coded To Perfection
The Dungeon Experience is a good example of this, but another one popped up over the weekend for Lunark, a “modern take on the 2D cinematic platformer genre”, by which its developers (mostly just creator Johan Vinet) mean its in the same vein as classics like Another World and Flashback.
Those were two games defined not just by their cinematic aspirations, heavy on cutscenes and dramatic framing, but because they achieved a lot of that via rotoscoping, the technology where people act scenes out on film then animators recreate it in a game/show/movie.
Lunark, appropriately, does much the same thing, but what I was so happy to see over the weekend was the footage behind the animation, which reveals that for every scene involved a dramatic sci-fi chase or some complex alien machinery, there was…a dude in his kitchen sitting on a shelf, swinging on some bars at a children’s playground or lovingly touching his floorboards:
If you’re into what you’ve seen here, the official pitch for the game is:
Set in a future where the Moon has been transformed into a vessel for humanity’s survival, LUNARK is a 2D adventure inspired by ‘90s classics. Run, jump, hang, climb, roll, and shoot through gorgeously animated environments while overcoming traps, solving puzzles, battling enemy droids, and more! Uncover the dark origin of humanity’s new home in this epic story of survival, revolution, and mystery.
Lunark was released back in March, and is available on Steam, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox.
You may have already seen, but Street Fighter 6‘s June 2, 2023 release date leaked late in the day on December 8. Apparently Sony, whether accidentally or intentionally, published the date on the PlayStation Store, alongside three different editions that will be available come launch. Now, during Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards, Capcom confirmed the date is in fact real. Mark your calendars, folks: Street Fighter is coming back next year.
Street Fighter 6 – Pre-Order Trailer
The Game Awards dropped a new trailer for Street Fighter 6 during the pre-show, where we saw fighters travel around the (digital) world: France, Italy, the United States, and the like. There were also some minigames, including bottle chopping, board breaking, and basketball blocking. Weird stuff. We also saw some new characters, such as the capoeira fighter Dee Jay and the gladiator brawler Marisa, alongside a cool-looking 2v2 mode where a player-created fighter and Ryu battled against two other fighters on the same screen at the same time.
Street Fighter 6 is looking wild.
The June 2023 release date slip-up was spotted on the PlayStation Store by Twitter users bestprosplay3 and SurpriseBum. It then proliferated on gaming forum website ResetEra, with preorder pages allegedly corroborating the date. There appear to be three editions of the game: Standard, Deluxe, and Ultimate. The Standard Edition will apparently come with the base game, one outfit color for six unspecified characters, and “special titles and stickers.” The Deluxe and Ultimate versions feature the same stuff, with the only difference being the Deluxe packages the Year 1 Character Pass, whereas the Ultimate houses the Year 1 Ultimate Pass. Prices for these editions weren’t disclosed at the time.
More than seven years after Street Fighter V came out in February 2016, Street Fighter 6 is Capcom’s latest entry in the long-running fighting game series. It’ll feature all the usual characters—Chun-Li, Guile, Ken, Ryu, etc.—as well as some new faces, such as the fire-fisted Luke and (my personal fave) the kunoichi Kimberly. There are some new elements introduced in the upcoming entry, too, including the combo-breaking Drive Impact move, a robust character creator you can use in the single-player open world, and the incredible training mode that actually teaches you fighting game lingo. It’s an exciting release I’m stoked to get whooped in.
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You don’t have to wait long to get your hands on the game. Yes, it does drop in June 2023, which is about six months away. But if you were part of Street Fighter 6‘s first closed beta, you can check out the second one that runs from December 16 to 19. Even if you didn’t get an invitation to play the first beta, you can still submit an application to get in on the second one through the game’s website. Two caveats here, though. The first is you must have a registered Capcom ID account. The second is that account must then be linked to whatever platform you’re applying to play on. Once you meet that criteria, and should you be selected, you will gain access to Street Fighter 6.
If you weren’t lucky enough to be picked for access to the game’s second closed beta, however, you will just have to wait until Street Fighter 6 launches in full on June 2, 2023. The game will land on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam.
