Katsushiro Harada, head of development on Tekken 8 and general franchise overlord, has issued a response over the controversial paid DLC Genmaji Stage, which arrived alongside the release of Heihachi Mishima and the new story chapter.
In case you missed out on everything, the new stage must be paid for, which upset a lot of fans considering the previous new Sea Side Resort stage (which arrived with Lidia) was free. However, this time around we got a brand new story chapter completely free, although that didn’t seem to placate Tekken 8 fans, who are up in arms about having to pay for the new battleground.
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In an effort to offer some transparency over the situation, Harada-san posted the following message on X:
I understand that the community has some questions about the release of this stage DLC.
As the person in charge of the TEKKEN franchise, I apologize.
It was made clear from the beginning that the Year One Pass (Season Pass) would not include stages, BUT even so, when the Lidia Sobieska DLC was released, the [Sea Side Resort Stage was a Free Update], and in this case, the [Even though the additional Story Mode, which should have had the highest development costs, is a Free Update],
BUT [the Genmaji stage was Sold Separately], and as a result, the release ended up being one that was NOT well understood or Accepted by everyone (at least the almost all community was expecting a pattern similar to that of Lidia).
There are various reasons for this, But I will talk about the background to this as an individual in order to increase transparency to some extent.
The TEKKEN project is divided into two companies: a game development studio and a publisher that is responsible for game sales (At the time of the development and release of TEKKEN 7, the development and publishing companies were not separate).
As some of you may know, I moved to the Development Studio side a few years ago, and have been focusing on maximizing the quality of the content/Tech/Graphics etc..
The development side and publishing side each have their own roles, and there are differences in the way they think and the responsibilities, I who should be the one to act as a bridge between the two, have not been able to properly participate in the publishing (sales) decision-making process for As a result, I think that there were parts of the process that did not take the Tekken community’s opinion into account.
I think I failed to create an organizational structure that would allow me to oversee things beyond my own position.
One of my roles was to listen to the opinions of the Community and reflect them not only in the content but also in the out-game, but I was clearly becoming passive, worrying about the relationships between companies and not exercising my role.
From now on, I will review this structure and change it to one that values the community as it did in the past.
Thank you.
Tekken 8 is now available for PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S, with Heihachi Mishima available now in early access and will be live for everyone else on October 3.
[Source – Katsuhiro Harada on X]