Kohei Ikeda, The Game Director of Tekken 8, Leaves Bandai Namco

Kohei "Nakatsu" Ikeda has just posted on his X account that after 20 years at the company, he is leaving Bandai Namco.

This announcement comes only 5 months after Harada's own departure from the studio, and 9 months after Yohei Shimbori's, leaving the game without its original producer and game directors.

Nakatsu doesn't specify why he left, though it's not difficult to speculate. Over the past few years, Harada would occasionally chime in with his knowledge and opinions when it came to game development, and one consistent thread of thought was the gap between executives and developers.

While the latter want to make the best game possible, the former are more interested in financials. They want to put in as little as money as possible, to have the developers make the safest possible product, and reap the highest possible benefit.

Even though Harada wasn't one to point fingers, he made it obvious that corporate meddling was behind some of the issues that Tekken players would complain about, and how this became increasingly more frustrating compared to his early days at the company, when developers were given more free reign over the development.

It might not be the main reason why he left, but it was certainly a factor, and perhaps with Harada moving on to a new company that is still looking for staff, Ikeda saw an opportunity to move as well. Although this is pure speculation, it wouldn't be surprising if he announced that he joined up with Harada at the newly formed VS Studio, which would also all but confirm that they're working on a fighting game.

While it's not rare to see developers leave their company after working there for decades, the reasoning you usually hear, is that they want to work on something new, do something fresh with their career. It's hard to imagine that this is Nakatsu's reasoning, since he started out as a Tekken pro and working on the franchise has essentially been a dream job for him.

When Tekken is your main passion, when fighting games are your core experience, where do you even go as a game developer? You're probably not applying to work on a new Final Fantasy or Resident Evil. Meanwhile, there's this studio that just opened up and is being headed by a person you've known and worked with for many years.

The math is mathing, is all I'm saying.

As for Tekken itself, the picture is looking a little muddy. The launch of Tekken 8 has been messy as is, but the state of the game only regressed further with Season 2. Regardless of small improvements over the last few patches, it's not the sort of mess that you can untangle with anything short of "new edition" level changes. 

With that in mind, is it really all that important that Harada, Ikeda, and Shimbori are no longer at the studio? It's hard to point this out without indirectly assigning blame, but later Tekken 7 and current Tekken 8 were a result of many poor decisions, so would be weird to worry about the state of the game after people who made those decisions start leaving.

Just recently we've seen so much praise for Alcratz's R.U.S.H., an indie fighter that distills 3D fighters to their absolute basics in the same way Footsies did with 2D games. You had both pros and average players talking about how it captures the essence of what made Tekken fun, how it understands why people love this series.

If a 29-year-old Tekken fan is capable of doing that, can we give some credit to people who actually worked on Tekken? Even with some of the key staff gone, there are many developers who live and breathe Tekken. We can't know what happens next, but the possibilities are similarly big in both negative and positive directions. It's not unlikely that new positions get filled by people who are extremely passionate about Tekken and steer the game towards a brighter future.

The only thing to really worry about is Bandai Namco itself. In one of the since deleted Twitch streams, Murray talked about how hard him and Harada had to beg for the company to greenlight a new Tekken game. The poor performance of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 was so disastrous that the suits were seemingly very comfortable putting Tekken IP into the fridge, yet Tekken 7 became the best-selling game in the whole franchise.

This game Tekken 8 space to take bigger swings, and it's a much more expensive game as a result, yet over two years later, it's last milestone still sits at 3 million sales. Depending on how just expensive it was to make, this could easily turn out to be another loss for Bandai Namco, and one that they might not be willing to overlook.

SoulCalibur is already basically dead. It's been 8 years since SC6 came out, and 6 years since the last piece of DLC came out, 5 years since Okubo left the company after his 25-year tenure. The game underperformed, and now there's no sign that it will ever come back. If the same happens to Tekken, will there be anyone left to try and fight with executives to try and continue the franchise?