SNK’s Harada says Japanese bosses don’t even play their games

Katsuhiro Harada spent decades being Tekken’s face at Bandai Namco before walking away at the end of last year. Now he’s running SNK’s new VS Studio in Tokyo, and he reckons this move could help drag Japan’s game industry back to its golden years.

Harada says bosses elsewhere don’t even play their own games

Speaking to VGC, Harada didn’t name names, but he didn’t hold back either. He said the real difference between SNK and most other big Japanese studios comes down to something painfully basic: the people running SNK actually love games. Elsewhere, he claims, leadership barely touches their own titles, not the prototypes, not the finished builds, nothing.

He said management at most major Japanese developers only shows up for the profit and loss meetings, never the actual game. According to Harada, you’d struggle to find a single upper management figure in Japan’s industry who plays the games their own studio makes. He was careful to frame it as an observation rather than a takedown, but it’s still a pretty damning one.

That’s the gap he thinks SNK can close. Whether or not one studio and a returning fighting game veteran can actually shift an entire industry’s culture, but at least someone up top is finally playing the games.

For more updates like this? Click right here!