Friday, October 31, 2025
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Articles by Ethan Gach

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Capcom Wobbles On Pay-Per-View Street Fighter 6 Livestream After Backlash
Technology

Capcom Wobbles On Pay-Per-View Street Fighter 6 Livestream After Backlash

Capcom Cup 12, with its finals scheduled for March of next year, is set to be the first pay-per-view livestream for a major Street Fighter tournament. On Friday, however, the Japanese publisher might change how much it charges players to watch it. That’s in response to a furious backlash from fans and competitive pros alike to what would be a controversial milestone for professional esports. “Currently, we are considering price adjustments for the paid live viewing,” Capcom announced on X earlier today, according to the platforms’ auto-translation. “We plan to make another announcement regarding the pricing of live viewing tickets, as well as the background and intent behind it, by late October.” ＜カプコンeSportsイベント 有料チケットに関するお知らせ＞本日より「CAPCOM CUP 12」「ストリートファイターリーグ: ワールドチャンピオンシップ 2025」の国技館の会場観戦チケットの抽選販売受付を開始いたします。 ▼詳しくはこちら▼https://t.co/UdNZJzoxUf… — CAPCOM eSports (@CAPCOM_eSports) October 10, 2025 While fans can pay to attend the tournament live in-person, they’ll also have to pay to watch it live online. Right now the ticket price is $40 for two days of matches. That’s as much as it currently costs to buy Street Fighter 6. While some fans are against Capcom charging at all, others might be satisfied if the publisher simply lowers the price, or rolls the ticketing into a broader package that also includes in-game cosmetics. Capcom’s retreat comes a week after Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama confirmed on social media that the development team was not consulted about the pay-per-view pricing for the more than $1 million prize pool event. “It may sound strange, but it’s true,” he wrote. “Revenue targets and assigned tasks differ fundamentally by department. Even the development team was surprised by this announcement. (At least Matsumoto and I were shocked at the venue). That said, since this matter occurred within the same company, we are currently discussing it. We apologize for any concern this may have caused.” For example, the initiatives we implemented in the previous title. That was a proposal from the development team—it was tough but fun.Since then, the organization has grown significantly, and various departments have been established.My main responsibilities now are improving… — TAKA-nakayama (@takaNakayama) October 2, 2025 He also confirmed that there was no discussions about including tickets for the livestream in add-on content for the game, like a World Championship costume set. Nakayama even added that he’d delete his post if he got “scolded at work” for it. That clearly hasn’t happened. “We kindly ask for your patience until then,” Capcom told fans today. “We sincerely appreciate your continued support for Capcom eSports events.”

Nintendo’s Short Films Feel Like They Could Be The Start Of Something Much Bigger
Technology

Nintendo’s Short Films Feel Like They Could Be The Start Of Something Much Bigger

Fans spent a lot of time trying to decipher possible clues hiding in a recent Pixar-like Nintendo short film featuring a baby and, as it turned out later on, Pikmin. Were they a tease for a new Pikmin game? Rosalina’s origin story in the Mario Galaxy movie? Apparently not. Nintendo now claims this short film experiment was all just for fun. It’s easy to see where it could go in the future, though. Are these the first building blocks of Nintendo’s version of a Disney-style streaming library? “These are the first short films created by Nintendo Pictures Co., Ltd.,” the company posted online this morning. “Nintendo Pictures will continue to explore new creative possibilities through video content.” The Pikmin shorts come just a couple months after a series of claymation Mario videos that felt like something out of Sesame Street. While they turned out to be hocking new merchandise for the Super Mario Bros. 40th anniversary, it was easy to imagine a whole streaming series based around a similar aesthetic and visual gags. This isn’t even the first time Nintendo has experimented with short movies and made Pikmin the stars. We hope you enjoyed the two “Close to You” videos released on October 7 and 8.The second video is available on Nintendo Today!, a free app available on your smart device.These are the first short films created by Nintendo Pictures Co., Ltd.Nintendo Pictures will continue to… pic.twitter.com/GKizLT0Ckv — 任天堂株式会社 (@Nintendo) October 9, 2025 It’s notable that the second of the two Pikmin short films is only viewable inside the Nintendo Today! app, a strange Switch 2-era digital curio that Nintendo still seems to be figuring out. It’s part of a growing and weirdly aligned set of entertainment touchpoints for the brand. There’s the music app with soundtracks dating back to the NES days, Switch Online’s library of classic games, new theme parks, and box office blockbusters like the upcoming Mario Galaxy and Zelda movies. Also alarm clocks, amiibo, Lego, and a whole adjacent universe of Pokémon, whose streaming app inside Switch was killed off a year ago. I would never expect Nintendo to do something so sane, rational, and predictable as trying to wrap all of this stuff into one coherent super-app, but it is easy to see an opening for more Nintendo content on streaming. The company doesn’t need an entire platform of content to win people over with a few hits. Millions of households sign up for Disney+ just for Bluey. Where is Nintendo’s Bluey? I say that not as some writer cosplaying as an industry analyst, but as a parent with three children who love Mario and have run out of Bluey to watch. They still occasionally watch the old Mario cartoons from the ’90s that I grew up with. What else are they going to do when they finish Super Mario Bros. Wonder and get tired of streaming The Super Mario Bros. Movie for the 50th time? If your answer is “Go back and play Super Mario Bros 3,“ than you’ve never watched young kids who weren’t raised on 8-bit graphics try to grapple with the low-stimulation limitations of unforgiving 2D platforming. Nintendo execs have spoken in the past about how the company’s biggest competitors aren’t PlayStation or Xbox but Netflix and the smartphone. It gave up trying to put games on mobile marketplaces dominated by free-to-play casinos, but it’s finally seeing if there’s a place in the ever-expanding universe of short-form video for a Mario-sized respite from all the algorithmic junk. That would be nice! I would take that over an Alarmo 2.

Doja Cat Denies Responsibility For Deleted Fortnite Post About Sex Toys, Calls It ‘Cringe’
Technology

Doja Cat Denies Responsibility For Deleted Fortnite Post About Sex Toys, Calls It ‘Cringe’

Doja Cat is coming to Fortnite’s 2025 Halloween event and the battle royale tried to get players hyped by letting R&B’s “Queen of Memes” take over the Fortnite X account on Wednesday. It didn’t take long for that piece of online performance art to blow up after the account tweeted what seemed like an obvious allusion to sex toys and Doja Cat denied being behind it. “Shit cringe as fuck now I’m embarrassed,” she wrote back. The Fortnite X account had Doja Cat’s in-game face as its avatar when it posted “mother of rose toys,” which many fans immediately took to mean sex toys. “Oh damn the sex update is real!!” one joked on the subreddit. But Doja Cat immediately distanced herself from the whole thing and the post was taken down. People didn’t believe her at first. “I told them not to man that’s not even me,” she wrote. “I said this yesterday and then said ‘don’t post that’ :/.” The internet-savvy artist has a history of trolling and back-handed marketing endorsements, as Polygon points out. So many are left wondering whether this was an actual brand activation gone bad or part of some elaborate 4D poster chess to get people talking and arguing about what is, at the end of the day, a microtransaction-filled in-game event aimed at getting players to empty their virtual wallets on overpriced skins. Is the modern media landscape so cynical as to desperately gin up a non-troversy just to pad the quarterly sales figures? Some folks are genuinely surprised that a game largely aimed at children would go anywhere near sexual entendres, even if the whole thing really is just a social media fake-out on page seven of the Fortnite Halloween 2025 marketing deck. With the culture already primed to lash out at any online gaming-adjacent micro-scandal, it does seem a bit far-fetched that Epic Games would willingly ignite a whole discourse cycle around “Fortnite sex toys.” After all, it only just got done making sure there weren’t any accidental Nazi allusions in its latest Peacemaker emote following some late season-2 twists. It’s due back tomorrow with a “modified” animation that will apparently remove any possibility of it accidentally conjuring a swastika. Then again, Epic didn’t seem too worried about Darth Vader, voiced by AI James Earl Jones, saying racist stuff and cursing at players, so who can say?