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2023 has been an excellent year for fighting games, with two of the biggest franchises in the genre – Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter – both releasing their latest titles mere months from one another. Tekken 8 is now soon upon us, set to launch in January of next year. Interestingly, the game was originally planned to release right around the same time as Street Fighter VI – but was delayed due to them not wanting to clash with a “certain fighting game.”
Long-time Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada recently took to his YouTube channel ‘Harada’s Bar’ to upload a video labelled ‘It had the same release date as our rival's title!’ in which the series producer revealed that Tekken 8 was delayed by 6 months in order to not clash with a certain other fighting game, saying:
“I’m not gonna say what title it is, but we found out about it 2 years ago…That title’s release date happened to be the same as Tekken 8. We were like ‘What should we do?’ But there was not much we could do, so we decided to delay our release date by half a year. We changed the release date to January 26th. Yes, we changed it. It was on the same month. We needed to do something about it.”
In doing some quick maths, it is clear that Harada is referring specifically to the recently-released Street Fighter VI, which launched on the 2nd of June 2023. Considering the fact that Tekken and Street Fighter are two of the biggest franchises in the genre, it makes sense for Harada and the team to have delayed the game, as releasing so close to one another would have likely done more harm than good to both titles.
All that said, with 6 months of extra development time, it will be interesting to see how Tekken 8 ultimately benefits from the delay, both in terms of the game’s quality and its sales.
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KitGuru says: What do you think of this revelation? Was delaying Tekken 8 the right move? Would 2023 have been the best year in fighting game history had Tekken 8 come out this year? Let us know down below.
