Super Street Fighter 4 Coming Later to Arcades - Welcome to Bizarro World

Back in the 90s, when fighters reined supreme in the arcades, console conversions could only hope to get all the characters and stages to fit on tiny gray cartridges and skippy, easy-to-scratch CDs.  It wasn't until the Dreamcast brought Soul Calibur home  in 1999 that consoles had finally proven to be superior to the arcade version in almost every way, and that spelled the death knell for arcades...at least in the U.S.  Today, Japanese arcades still thrive, but arcades are all but extinct in the U.S.

Two years ago, when Street Fighter 4 was in the preliminary stages of revive the fighting game market, Japan released SF4 in the arcades as a sort of beta test.  Now, according to a video announcement on Shadowloo and confirmed via Arcade Infinity, Super Street Fighter IV will be released in the arcades around July or August, about 4 months after the console release at the end of April.  Sure, this makes sense in Japan, with it's thriving arcade market, but still, with an online system connecting fighters from all over the world, joysticks that recreate the arcade sticks almost perfectly, and the lack of having to pump the equivalent of 3 games worth of quarters/tokens into a machine over a game's lifetime, you'd think they'd at least released the game into the arcade first.