There’s definitely a healthy dose of a certain “back in my day,” (or maybe now it’s “Okay, Boomer”) theme in part of recent discussion between Bandai Namco’s Katsuhiro Harada and PlayStation’s Shuhei Yoshida.
Tekken 8 still has a little of that fresh out of the packaging smell to it, and so Harada has been taking opportunities to promote as well as discuss the future of the franchise. When Yoshida asked about the latter, Harada had a fairly specific answer clearly already tumbling about in his mind: we’re going to need to appeal to the younger generations, and they don’t view losing and competition like we older folks do.
Harada describes his generation (he’s currently 53) as one that grew up with a sense of matter of fact competition when it came to many routine practices such as applying for a school or interviewing for a job.
As such, he reasons that people from this generation tend to prefer more definitive, black and white outcomes. He notes that younger people don’t seem to have that same relation to competition, however, and aren’t as akin to joining contests that determine such clear winners and losers.
“Most young perople nowadays are the opposite. They’re rarely eager to engage in one-on-one showdowns,” he starts his answer. “Because fighting games pit you by yourself against a single opponent, you have to accept all the responsibility if you lose.”
It’s not to say all people below a certain age simply can’t deal with the responsibility of losing, but Harada does suppose that an significant percentage of the younger gamer base increasingly prefers games where the burden of loss can be shared.
“In team-based shooters, when players win, they can that they won because of the own contributions, but when they lose, it’s because they got matched with a lousy team,” he follows with.
Tekken 8, which dropped only in January, still very much pits players in one on one scenarios where the burden and reward of failure and victory still fall squarely on an individual’s shoulders, but will this be the way of things going forward?
It sounds like this may not be the way of the future, as Harada continues on to describing what kinds of alterations may need to be made in order to maintain youthful interest in the fighting game genre.
You can see what he had to say by checking out the full video below, the part relevant to our focus here begins right around the 1:03:34mark.
It seems as though Harada may not be in the fighting game development game for all that much longer, by the way, as he recently alluded to his own planned retirement after passing one more significant milestone in his Tekken career.