In an interview with Famitsu, Street Fighter 5 producer Yoshinori Ono discussed the game, and decisions being made on the roster. He revealed why classic character Sagat won’t be a part of the roster.
According to Ono, “It’s because there are many characters that perform similarly. For this launch and its next update, we wanted to have a good balance of characters. Since we didn’t want to just blindly increase the number of characters, it was a bitter decision that had to be made.”
He didn’t rule out the inclusion of Sagat and Blanka in future updates, however.
Speaking of character DLC, Ono stated that eSports had a major role in deciding what characters would be added to the roster in future content. “After thinking about the post-launch services, I believe that from an e-sports point of view it wouldn’t be fair to not know which characters will be added in, in order to know which characters you’ll want to practice or which characters you’ll get for counter-picks, so we decided to do it that way,” he explained. “For the time being, we have no plans on releasing any other characters outside of the six characters that we announced.”
Sagat was one of the original Street Fighter characters. The only iteration he did not appear in was Street Fighter III.
