Street Fighter 6 players tagged with racial slur during tournament livestream

Last night, over 1,000 players signed up to the Coinbox Street Fighter 6 tournament, hosted and organized by professional Smash Bros player Hungrybox. During this tournament, racial slurs were attributed to two players live over the course of an entire match.

Initial guesses pointed to a hacker bypassing security measures and changing the player's pronoun tags to the racial slurs, knowing they would should up on stream beneath the competitor's names. However, upon digging into the situation fingers were pointed at a technical fault with the software used to automatically pull player information from the tournament listing and placing it on stream. Ultimately, an apology was issued by Hungrybox to both Punk and XSpoonX, who were the two players affected.

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This technical fault was initially waived off as a joke that both players had knowledge of before the match. Start.gg, the tournament website used to organise the event, allows players to set their own pronouns on the account they use to sign up to tournaments like Streetbox. The software in use by the tournament organisers is meant to scan the accounts of players on stream, display accurate information on them such as their names, Twitter account, and pronouns, and display it on stream.

Somehow, despite Punk not having pronouns set on his account, this software apparently went back and pulled pronouns used by another player who entered an event several months ago. Unaware of this fault, the racial slurs were displayed beneath both Punk and XspoonX's names over the course of the entire game, before they were taken off stream.

Punk raised his frustrations regarding the situation immedietely after the match on Twitter. The initial response from Hungrybox, the face of the tournament and unaware of the fault, was to point out the automatic nature of the software. Upon recognition that Punk had no pronouns set at all, let alone racial slurs, this was later blamed on a malicious hacker.

At this point the situation had garnered the attention of the online community, which began digging into the situation. Rekka, a UK-based Smash Bros tournament organiser and commentator dug into Start.gg and found that the pronouns were being pulled from a Canadian player called Blacktwins. Why them? it appears that a tournament organiser for Canadian event Heaven's Arena back in July 2022 never closed out their match, which had been listed as ongoing for over 476,000 hours.

For some reason, the software in use pulled the pronouns from Blacktwins, and applied them to both Punk and Spoon. Blacktwins would go on to apologise on Twitter, despite not being at fault at all for the situation.

The situation seemingly figured out as an unfortunate technical fault, Hungrybox publically stated that the software that caused this issue would no longer be used. This did little to curb criticism however, as many believe that someone on the team should have spotted and removed these pronoun tags far sooner. Producer for Tenomedia HonzoGonzo, a media company responsible for running the livestreams for various huge fighting game events, was one such individual stating: "Yah, Punk is 10000% justified in any anger he feels, this had to get past so many people to make it to air. A litany of errors that should have immediate accountability and not random guesses on what occurred."

The result of all this? Punk has stated he'll no longer be participating in Coinbox events in the future. He is rightfully frustrated with the situation - choosing tags for yourself like Blacktwin did is one thing - but having them thrust upon you without your consent is a totally different matter. On his livestream, Punk would further express his frustrations towards those taking Hungrybox's corner in his livestream.

Hungrybox would ultimately apolagise in a long thread following the event. He'd state: "Today went far from perfect. Apart from it being the first time we ran a non-platform fighter, I felt I failed as a tournament organizer. I feel had I been more familiar with organizing the stream and production, a lot of unfortunate circumstances could have been avoided."

"A lot of it boils down to me trying to do it all at once - streaming, TOing, casting, entertaining, and production. Whereas in Smash it's something I'm more comfortable with, this was a whole new ballgame. In other words - I feel I should have triple-checked things more."

"Instead of assuming the pronouns were a troll/bit, I should have taken them down ASAP. Moreso - I should've noticed the program was glitched before it even showed on screen. I got way too dependent on the automation. @PunkDaGod - this one's on me. Not my staff. I apologize."

They'd continue by leaving the future of Coinbox fighting game events in the hands of the community, and announcing their intention to step back for a while. While a nice sentiment, it's like the online fighting game community has some council of elders that can force players to not take part in Hungrybox's events in the future. As a popular influencer, he could easily pull together packed events with or without the support of some respected players. Especially with Street Fighter 6, which has proven very popular.

With the future of these particular events in limbo, this event should hopefully stand out as a warning to future organisers to monitor streams for innapropriate content. It's a hard gig certainly, but there are some slip ups that you've just got to jump on.

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