Capcom has not shipped a new mainline Street Fighter in about a decade, and the version that arrived this week is remarkable mostly for what it declines to do.

Everyone who wrote about the genre’s decline agreed on the diagnosis. Fighting games died because they became impenetrable, walled off behind frame data and execution barriers that took a year to clear before you could have any fun at all. The prescription that followed was obvious: simplify. Cut the link timings, flatten the inputs, make the first hour rewarding.

Street Fighter IV does essentially none of that. The fundamentals are the same fundamentals. Spacing still decides most rounds before a special move happens, charge characters still charge, and the distance between someone who has played for a week and someone who has played for a year is as brutal as it ever was. What Capcom modernised is the presentation, all ink-wash and thick outlines over 3D models fighting on a 2D plane, and it looks superb without changing a thing about how the game is played.

The one real mechanical addition is the focus attack, and it is not a simplification. It is another layer, a way to absorb a hit and cancel out of it, and it makes high level play more complicated rather than less. Capcom looked at a genre widely declared too hard and added depth.

I think that is correct and I think the reason it works is not the design at all. It is that this is the first Street Fighter released into a world where you can find an opponent at three in the morning without leaving the house. The genre did not die of complexity. It died when arcades closed and there was nobody sitting next to you, and everything that got blamed on execution barriers was really a distribution problem wearing a different coat.

Which makes the netcode the most important feature in the game, and netcode is the thing nobody puts on a box. A fighting game is unplayable at latencies that a shooter absorbs without anyone noticing, and if online matches feel loose in six months, none of the above will save it.

What irritates me is how long this took. The audience did not go anywhere. Capcom left a decade of silence in a genre it owned, watched it be pronounced dead, and has now demonstrated in one release that the corpse was breathing the whole time.