Tekken 8’s director says your “silly threats” won’t help get your favorite character on the roster

Tekken 8 director Katsuhiro Harada has revealed that the “silly threats” some purported fans send to him and other Tekken 8 development team members have a significant impact not just on morale but also on costs and even the inclusion of some characters.

The news came via a lengthy Twitter thread in which Harada shared an example of a “silly” threat wherein the player said that if Eddy wasn’t included in Tekken 8‘s line-up, he was going to “hit [Harada] with a Burning Hammer”. The player even tagged Harada in the reply.

Harada revealed that even jokes can be problematic, resulting in “everyone [in the fighting game community] suffering the following losses”.

Citing the example he’d included, Harada said: “The event operator overreacts and increases security, which increases operating costs, and increases the burden on the players attending the event. In the worst case, the event management will request me to cancel my attendance at the event.”

But that’s not all. Harada further added that “company founders, board members, and lawyers don’t like to be intimidated”, so if they get threats – “joking” or otherwise – they even ask Harada to remove characters or features from the game, even if he thinks they should “have been included in the game in the first place”. 

Harada says this is more likely to happen if “the person making these threats uses the word ‘we instead of ‘I’ to represent the fans”.

“Many of them don’t understand this. I do not adopt the views of those who use ‘we’ when expressing their opinions. It is up to the development team to decide whether the opinion is majority or minority, and the person expressing the opinion says: ‘Everyone around me says so!’ (at most 5-6 people around me) is irrelevant.

“By enthusiasts behaving excessively, repeating these words and actions, or fake information and hoaxes, or threats, the motivation of the development staff will decrease rapidly, and as a result, the requests of enthusiasts will be far from being realized,” he concluded.

Did you know that six unannounced characters from Tekken 8′s roster were leaked during the closed network tests? Whilst the first Tekken 8 CNT was exclusive to PS5 owners, another test – this time open up to players on Steam – gave dataminers the opportunity to use a tool called Cheat Engine. 

This can be downloaded by anyone and allows the user to scrub the memory of games revealing hidden content or even, in some cases changing the game to give players more resources, health, or ammo. 

Thanks to Cheat Engine, PC players were able to exploit the copy of Tekken 8 and scrub its memory and data for unannounced content. While not all games work with Cheat Engine, players have particular luck with single-player Steam games and that’s how we were able to see some of Tekken 8‘s roster ahead of schedule. 

While the release date has yet to be confirmed, Tekken 8 will be available to play on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.