Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown, the umpteenth version of the game in its one-and-a-half-decade history, seemed to be a good move, so SEGA is considering a new title.

SEGA based Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown on VF5’s Final Showdown version. In the West, it launched in 2012 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. In Japan, it was the 8th version in the arcades in 2010 (with two further revisions for it!). Virtua Fighter 5’s current version uses the Dragon Engine, used in recent Yakuza titles. The fighting game seems to have made the right move.

“The retention rate is high in Japan. I feel that the title that was born in Japan is big. Many people play in Asia, Europe and the United States, which have a large population. The number of downloads was more than expected. Sony Interactive Entertainment has a “forecast team” that predicts the number of downloads, but it was pretty close to the target numbers they predicted in advance.

One of the purposes of this work was to measure the potential as a title, but as I mentioned earlier, the results show that more people than expected were interested in it, so this result. It is our job to think about what to do in the future. […] I am seriously thinking about the production of the next project while thoroughly investigating and analyzing it. I am developing a vision [of how to] make such a title, if I make it,” Moriji Aoki, a SEGA producer, told Dengeki Online, a Japanese publication, in an interview, confirming that Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown was not made for money.

In other words: if SEGA tasks him with developing Virtua Fighter 6, he will do it, but it will require a few years (as a fighting game takes a lot of time to nail it…), and then, the company would have to concentrate on an international audience to appeal both to the Japanese and the Western players. Aoki added that he considered bringing Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown to Steam, but it would spread the audience if the game were on multiple platforms, and cross-play would be a challenge for SEGA.

So… what holds them back, again?

Source: WCCFTech