Capcom is doubling down on its controversial move to make its annual Street Fighter championship a pay-per-view product. Yesterday, the popular fighting game publisher released a series of guidelines for restreaming and creating clips from the upcoming Capcom Cup 12 and Street Fighter League World Championship.
In the announcement, Capcom states that while creators will be able to co-stream the publicly watchable portions of the tournament, the main competition taking place on March 14 and 15 will be restricted to paying viewers only.
Capcom also explicitly states that creating clips without express permission will also violate its guidelines. Creators will also be prohibited from using footage from the tournament for their own videos until after the footage becomes publicly available on March 24 — more than a week after the tournament concludes.
Capcom Cup will run from March 11 to 14 in Japan and award a $1 million USD prize to the winner. Pay-per-view tickets for the English-language broadcast are priced at ¥900 JPY ($5.71 USD).
The monetization of esports broadcasts has been one of the biggest blockers to the industry’s long-term viability as a profitable enterprise. Several models have been tried over the years, including the infamous exclusivity deal for the Overwatch League, which cost Twitch a reported $90 million. Currently, the popularity of Street Fighter, particularly the SFL, has been largely concentrated in Japan. It remains to be seen if a pay-per-view product largely catered to a localized audience will provide Capcom with a reliable revenue stream, or further disenfranchise the global Street Fighter audience that is restricted in its ability to watch the grand finale of its worldwide competitive circuit.