Street Fighter 6 beta was good. It was really good. So much so that the few players who were able to participate in the beta wanted a way to continue playing after the beta ended on October 10. And now, Capcom has put everyone on the wrong side of the prankster by deleting the game's executable file from people's computers.

As GamesRadar reported, the thing started with a mod released on October 14 that allowed people with keys to continue accessing certain offline modes after the beta ended. Most of these were offline versus, but a few additional tweaks allowed access to training modes as well. Of course, it began to spread from Discord's servers to Reddit, which caught Capcom's attention.

Currently, an update is available on Steam as of October 20 that removes the game's executable file. Since this is what is needed to run the mod, the mod is almost dead in the water; according to GamesRadar, there are specific methods that can be used to retrieve the .exe, none of which are particularly problematic, of course.

It is indeed unfortunate that the beta was exclusive and short-lived. Many of my friends applied for keys but came up empty handed and bought keys just to play. It's clear that Street Fighter 6 is a big deal right now. I got to touch it a bit at a recent fighting game event and really enjoyed it. The beta version of [Street Fighter 5] was completely cracked and anyone could download and try it until launch. This time, it was closer to a modification than a crack. I hope Capcom doesn't steer us away from doing PC betas in the future.