Dan was chosen for Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition Season 5 because he is popular with both the players and the developers
Dan Hibiki, Rose, Oro, Akira Kazama (from Rival Schools), and one other unnamed challenger will be the final five characters to join Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition throughout Season 5.
For some, Dan might come across as a wasted slot since the character is generally relegated to being a joke character. Dan has basically been designed to be intentionally bad in every game he's appeared in which will likely have him be a low tier upon release.
So why was Dan chosen for Season 5? According to Capcom, Dan was chosen for his popularity.
"Dan is a really popular character with not just the players, but also with the developer team so we definitely wanted to include him," said a Capcom representative during the Dan showcase.
According to the Street Fighter CFN popularity contest that begun before the start of Season 3 of Street Fighter 5, Dan is the 17th most popular character in the Street Fighter series.
If we remove the characters that are already playable in Street Fighter 5 (counting Kage as Evil Ryu), then Dan becomes the 5th most popular character that has yet to be added. The only fighters that were more popular than Dan during the poll were Makoto, Q, Dudley, and Skullomania.
Earlier this year, we also held our own poll asking our readers which characters they'd like to see get added to Street Fighter 5 Season 5. Dan ended up securing a 12th place finish with Makoto, Oro, C. Viper, Fei Long, Rose, Dudley, Sodom, a newcomer, Maki, Elena, and Gouken ranking higher than the Saikyo Master.
It turns out that Dan actually is fairly popular with the fighting game community.
