This may not seem like a big deal seeing as how arcades are virtually dead in the US, but for those who play Street Fighter competitively, this is some of the best news to come around since the game's announcement. Despite how good the home console ports are these days, many in Japan would much rather go down to the local arcade and play people face-to-face. So, without a proper arcade release, Super Street Fighter IV would have been more or less ignored in Japan (witness its exclusion from this year's Super Battle Opera). Since many of the tactics and techniques that we see in high-level play are developed in Japanese arcades, it would have been up to the rest of the world to find all of the game's nuances had there not been an arcade release. It's not that we couldn't find cool things on our own - it's just that it would have taken us much longer.