The game was delayed due to market oversaturation

Jan 22, 2015 10:57 GMT  ·  By

It seems that the highly anticipated Tekken X Street Fighter video game will eventually make its way to gamers' hands.

Many members of the community gave up on hoping to ever see it come out and were suspecting the project of having become varpoware, but Tekken series director Katsuhiro Harada has assured everyone that the game is actually going to be released.

Furthermore, he has revealed that a team of 40 developers are currently working on the fighting video game, but that its status is difficult to talk about.

He has said that, although he originally planned to release the game much earlier, he had to delay it due to the fact that fighting games have saturated the market and that he wants to surprise people when Tekken X Street Fighter eventually comes out.

Harada has refrained from mentioning any concrete time frame for when we can expect the game to surface, stating that for the time being Bandai Namco Games' focus is Tekken 7, another highly anticipated fighting game.

Tekken 7 is said to deliver the conclusion to the entire Mishima Clan saga and to see the end of the conflict between Heihachi, Kazuya and Jin. The game will also deliver the origin story of the Devil Gene, so it's going to be interesting to see where the franchise will go in the future.

It's been a long time coming

"People have been talking about the game for such a long time that they aren’t going to be surprised if you just release it normally," Harada tells Polygon.

He has cited the release of PlayStation 3 exclusive Tekken Revolution, a free-to-play fighting game, as an example of surprising the franchise's fans. Tekken Revolution was released a mere week after the official announcement landed, and Harada has hinted at the fact that Tekken X Street Fighter might get a similar treatment.

Street Fighter X Tekken, Capcom's side of the deal, released back in 2012, was seen by many as a pretty straightforward and uninteresting deal, as many people kind of imagined how the Tekken crew would translate into Street Fighter mechanics.

The game was met with critical acclaim but Capcom stated that it underperformed, failing to meet projected sales targets. One of the reasons cited was the saturation of the fighting game market, and the controversy surrounding locked on-disc DLC and some features missing from the Xbox 360 edition certainly didn't help push sales.

The really interesting thing would be to see how the characters in Street Fighter will adapt to Tekken's gameplay, but it seems that we still have a long wait ahead of us.