Capcom and Novaly Studios are teaming up to bring Street Fighter into the world of Roblox.
For the next four weeks, users in the Roblox fighting game Untitled Boxing Game will be able to play as characters from Capcom’s Street Fighter series, with Ryu becoming playable in the game yesterday, October 9, and a second, yet-to-be-announced character arriving on October 16. Developed by Novaly Studios, Untitled Boxing Game is one of the most popular fighting games on Roblox, boasting over 1.4 billion lifetime visits and an average concurrent user count in the thousands since Novaly published the game in 2023.
“It’s really a dream brand collaboration, because we have positioned ourselves as the premier fighting game on Roblox,” said Novaly Studios co-founder and lead engineer Shon Vivier in an interview with GamesBeat. “There are a lot of games that have action and combat that are bigger, but they’re more casual-oriented. We’re actually trying to be a bit more competitive here, so Street Fighter is a perfect fit for us.”
Novaly Studios co-founders (and brothers) Max and Shon Vivier grew up playing Street Fighter and said that the Capcom series was one of the inspirations behind Untitled Boxing Game. In addition to their natural interest in fighting games, both brothers told GamesBeat they felt deeply connected to Japanese culture and IP through a lifelong interest in anime. The company has been in talks with Capcom about a potential collaboration “on and off for like a year,” per Max, and kicked off the development process for yesterday’s integration for about three months.
Ben Sarraille, the co-founder of the agency Makeshift, which helped broker the deal between Capcom and Novaly Studios, said the roots of the Untitled Boxing Game integration went back even further than a year.
“We started talking to the Capcom team over 2 years ago, not looking to make an immediate sale, but to understand more of their interest in the space. We’re lucky to meet and chat with a lot of the most interesting devs on Roblox, so if we know what rights holders want, it’s just a matter of time to find it,” Sarraille said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Then, about a year ago, we started talking with Max and Shon at Untitled Boxing Game: a hyper polished, competitive fighting game, inspired as much by boxing as anime. Of course, there was a lot to do from there to launch, but it was clear in that moment they were perfect for each other.”
The Viviers said Capcom gave Novaly Studios free rein to integrate Street Fighter characters where and how they felt was best, allowing them to choose whichever characters excited them most for the integration.
“From what I have learned about Japanese brand owners this feels notable because historically they are conservative with their IP,” said Joanne Redfern, the founder and chief executive officer of the digital brand and IP consultancy Futrhood Media, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Consideration and control are longstanding features of creative execution in Japan and oftentimes that can feel at odds with spaces like Roblox that for some IP owners feel ‘fast and loose.’”
Novaly Studios took the responsibility of integrating one of the most well-known fighting game brands into Untitled Boxing Game seriously, undergoing a painstaking animation and balancing process to ensure that the characters’ fighting styles were both balanced and accurate to the original Street Fighter games. Shon Vivier, who is a casual boxer in his free time, said he spent hours shadowboxing moves from Street Fighter to ensure he understood them well.
“I’ve been watching him, over the past month, bouncing around the apartment, doing uppercuts from Street Fighter and the Hadouken,” Max Vivier said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Oftentimes, the fighting style that you see in the game — he’s actually practiced them in real life to make sure that the movement feels fluid.”
To ensure the new Street Fighter characters would be correctly balanced in the metagame of Untitled Boxing Game, the Viviers purchased copies of Street Fighter 6 for every member of its balancing team, encouraging them to play the game and figure out how to best adapt it for UBG. They said a balance team member named Goudafficial had been particularly integral to the project, “balancing it like a factory, constantly, every day.”
“For every move or sequence, he mocks it up physically before animating it in-game. However exaggerated moves can get, it’s this grounding in reality that gives the game a feeling of authenticity,” Sarraille said.
Beyond the natural alignment between Street Fighter and Untitled Boxing Game, the partnership between Capcom and Novaly Studios represents one of the largest homegrown Japanese intellectual properties to enter Roblox in an official capacity yet. Japanese IP is tremendously popular on Roblox, but the overwhelming majority of them are unlicensed. Sarraille said he hoped the Street Fighter/UBG integration would encourage more top Japanese rightsholders to dip their toes into user-generated content.
“Having observed the vast influence that anime and manga IP has throughout the platform, it confirms the hunger that young global audiences have for the rich lore, large story worlds, and complex characters that typify the anime genre,” Redfern said. “Kodansha, Sega, and now Shueisha have acknowledged the size of the fanbase on Roblox and usage of the platform within Japan is increasing too, so official activations are arguably primed to explode.”