Capcom deletes Street Fighter 6 beta from players' hard drives after hackers find a way to keep playing

Street Fighter 6
(Image credit: Capcom)

After a number of Street Fighter 6 fans began sharing a way to keep playing the beta even after it was officially over, Capcom has issued a new update that essentially deletes the game from players' hard drives.

A mod for the Street Fighter 6 beta on Steam was released on October 14, allowing players to jump into offline versus mode, and with some additional effort, even get into training mode. The only real catch is that you needed to have a beta invite key in the first place to be able to install the game and the mod.

This is all right on the border between 'modding' and 'piracy,' so we're specifically not linking to any of the methods here. But the mod started to spread on platforms like Reddit as of October 18, bringing it a whole new level of notoriety. Apparently, it was around this time that Capcom noticed as well, or it's at least a funny little coincidence. 

A new, official update for the Street Fighter 6 beta went live this morning which, according to players, deletes the game's executable file. Obviously, you need the exe in order for the game to run. There are, uh, methods to get that file back, though certainly not official ones.

Like pretty much everyone else, we had a fantastic time with the Street Fighter 6 beta, even if we're still recovering from the nightmares induced by its character creator.

If you're looking for more of the best fighting games to brawl out - games you can play without downloading sketchy files online - you can follow that link.

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.