The mistake that so many game developers do: put all their chips on the new fans while forgetting their core audience. Was it so hard to put one fan favorite in this lineup?
"Oh cool there's lots of young fans, fuck everyone else I guess!" Why not have something for everyone?
Street Fighter 6 Director Takayuki Nakayama explains why Capcom added 3 new characters alongside Tifa Lockhart in Season 4
“First, we hadn’t released any completely new characters since the autumn following the game’s launch, so adding new characters was a priority, Secondly, to strengthen the Street Fighter brand — not just Street Fighter 6 specifically, but the franchise as a whole — we felt that introducing new characters was essential and finally, the player demographic for Street Fighter 6 has skewed much younger; while the core player base used to be in the 35 – 40 age range, the largest segment is now between 15 and 25. We wanted to support these players by offering them a fresh experience, one where they can play with a sense of novelty and relate to the characters on their own level. That is the reasoning behind our strategy to bolster the roster with new characters.”