Razer Street Fighter 5 PS4 Fight Sticks Malfunction at Tournament, CEO Responds

The Halo World Championship wasn't the only professional gaming event held last night. The Final Round 19 Street Fighter V tournament finals took place last night in Georgia--but things didn't go exactly to plan. Sponsored Razer player |nfiltration ultimately took home the crown, but not before his Razer PS4 fight stick, and the arcade sticks used by two other Razer-sponsored players, malfunctioned.

Razer players Fuudo and Xian's sticks totally shut down during matches, according to NeoGAF forum members, while Infiltration's ran into a problem connecting with the PS4. It is not exactly clear how the hardware malfunctions ultimately affected the results of the tournament.

In a statement on Facebook, Razer CEO Ming-Liang Tan said the fight sticks had problems because they are actually prototype units that are still in development. The executive went on to say that it is an open secret that Razer tests new fight sticks at tournaments before releasing them publicly.

"In this case, it's provided Infiltration with the win as he was using one of our prototypes in the tournament," he explained. "The bad news however is that despite our PS4 prototype sticks working flawlessly for the past couple of months, what looks to be a firmware bug resulted in a malfunction of some our prototypes that were used at the tournament.

"Rest assured that we'll be resolving this issue before we go into the next phase of testing and before they go into mass production."

As a result of the hardware malfunction, Tan said Razer will pull out of its sponsorship deals for future Fighting Game Community events until the new fight sticks are ready to go out the door.

"I understand this may cause some concern as we see other corporate sponsors pulling out from the FGC at this time but rest assured we will reinstate our sponsorships for the FGC when our PS4 products are ready and of course our existing support for our players remains unaffected," Tan explained.

Infiltration's win at the Final Round 19 event this weekend earned him a spot in the Capcom Cup to be held in December. You can see a recap of the tournament here on Capcom's website.