Katsuhiro Harada Wants to Try Something New With His One Last Project

Ever since VS Studio was founded under SNK earlier this year, not much has been known about it. Even the normally quite talkative Katsuhiro Harada hasn't said much about it, despite sitting at the helm of it, but it seems like he now opened up a bit in his discussion with GameIndustry.

However, there's still no mention of exactly what they're working on. It's mostly Harada reflecting on everything that led up to this. How each Tekken game took longer to make, the rising costs of AAA games in general, and the uncertain future of the local scenes for fighting games, which believes to be the core of the genre.

The most disappointing thing here is how Harada talks of meeting Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. According to him, the man who has a dissenting journalist killed and chopped into pieces inside a Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul, is actually super passionate about video games!

It's one thing to ignore or overlook the issues with the blood money bankrolling your game studio, but it feels like a step too far to commend the man responsible for murder, human rights violations, and modern slavery, for not being as money focused as modern video game executives.

Ultimately, if VS Studio title ends up being the last game from Katsuhiro Harada, it's going to be a rather sad end to a long legacy from a man who genuinely cared about the community and series he was in charge of, in a way that few other people did.

The tainted funding that comes directly from Saudi Arabia government is not comparable to many other development studios that simply operate within a country that has its own share of historical or ongoing issues, it goes much further than that, and it will be a long time until that context is distant enough for people to judge the game on its own merits.