Capcom finally paying out the big cash prizes the FGC deserves

This year, Capcom is going to make some of the world’s best fighting game players rich—or at least pretty well off.

That’s the big takeaway from the company’s official announcement regarding this year’s edition of the Capcom Pro Tour, announced in December to feature a minimum of $500,000 in total prize money. The company offered details about the tour’s format last night, and it threw around some appropriately big numbers.

The tour will feature 42 separate stops, 16 of which will be designated as “premier” events featuring boosted prize pools. These stops will include tournaments in such countries as Japan, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Thailand, Canada and the United States. The two biggest events will be July’s Evo tournament in Las Vegas and the season-ending Capcom Cup.

The tour will make this year’s Ultra Street Fighter 4 tournament at Evo the richest in the event’s history, with a $50,000 purse being posted by Capcom. But that’s not even close to being the richest event of this year.

That event, the Capcom Cup, will feature a huge prize pool of $250,000—leaps and bounds beyond anything previously seen in fighting game events. Just as impressive: $120,000 will go to the winner.

The remainder of the purse will be distributed among the other players to finish in the top eight. Thirty two players will be invited based on tour tournament victories and overall point totals accrued during the course of the season. Defending champion Yusuke Momochi has already been invited, and may currently be wishing Capcom had decided to fund the tour in this way a year ago.

It wasn’t quite all good news for players and fans. The announcement also revealed that the Ultra Street Fighter 4 tournament at this year’s Evo will use the Playstation 4 console exclusively.

This comes as no surprise given that it is Sony’s involvement which has allowed Capcom to fund the tour as they have. But it’s a problem for players who don’t own specialized arcade sticks compatible with the Playstation 4, which will likely be the extreme majority of potential entrants. The market for compatible controllers or, at the very least, workable modifications is sure to get tight as July approaches.

The change is also notable considering that Ultra Street Fighter 4 still has yet to be released on the Playstation 4. That’s scheduled to happen sometime this year. Hopefully it’ll find its way onto the market early enough to allow the ironing out of any bugs that might figure into the tournament at Evo.