Street Fighter V currently sits at
35 characters as of when this thread was made & it'll likely grow over the course of Season 4 (by how much, we don't know right now) 40 characters (& is likely gonna stop there if the clues of SFVI's reveal are any indication). The current biggest roster in a mainline Street Fighter game is Ultra Street Fighter IV with 44 characters. But with regards to if Street Fighter could bring back every veteran from previous entries, that's a bit of a tricky question. On the plus side, Street Fighter doesn't really have any guest characters, so Capcom would be in the clear from a rights perspective. However, Street Fighter is known to start from zero for each numbered Street Fighter entry. And after the blow-back from the blatant (& less-than-stellar-looking) asset reuse for Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, Capcom would likely be met with similar criticism if they reused SFV's assets for Street Fighter VI (&
it seems like most of you want Capcom to start from scratch for SFVI). Taking the "Everyone is Here" approach with SFVI would require tons of asset reuse from SFV on top of making a ton of characters from SFI, II, Alpha, III, & IV who didn't make the jump to SFV. And while the animations for most the existing SFV cast may hold up going into the next console generations, the models likely won't (plus you'd probably be limited to the skeletons of SFV's models, which would limit the potential to change characters). And while granted, there are characters like Charlie Nash & M. Bison who are canonically dead post-SFV, they could be justified as what-if characters who don't factor into the story. So it is possible for Capcom to pull off Smash Ultimate's feat with Street Fighter, probably.
But given how Capcom handles new numbered Street Fighter entries, it's not exactly a realistic for the Street Fighter series.
