Tekken 8 is once again experiencing a crisis that could change not only its status as a major competitive fighting game, but also its place in the overall esports scene.
As explained in this video by TheScore, this is the culmination of several poor choices by Bandai Namco stacking on top of each other. The main issue revolves around the patch that introduced Season 2. While Tekken’s developers promised that Season 2’s initial patch would improve overall defensive options, the players found that they put their focus elsewhere.
While there were changes that improved defense, the developers also added a host of new moves for nearly every character. Subsequently, the changes to individual moves and systems have led to there being more options that give each player a 50/50 chance. The consensus among players is that the changes can be enjoyable to play with in casual play.
However, Season 2 has ruined Tekken 8 for the purposes of competitive play. Now, there’s room for debate on how to balance fighting games so that they can still draw in new players, while keeping the hardcore players happy as well. But since Bandai Namco has invested in Tekken’s esports scene, they do have a responsibility to make the game in such a way that is conducive for high level players to compete among themselves on who the best player is.
Some would argue this is a bargain fighting game developers made that may not be worth it in the long run, or that they aren’t managing the balance between casual and hardcore players correctly. What we need to remember here is the players who are vocal about their complaints play Tekken 8 for a living, either as content creators, competitive players, or more commonly, a combination of both. To put it simply, the developer’s choices affect the livelihoods of many of their fans as well.
What has exacerbated the issue is that Tekken’s developers promised that they would get a new patch out sometime in the middle of or late in April. Because the first rounds of eSports tournaments are coming up in the second week of May, the players don’t have enough time to study two completely separate rounds of changes in the game.
While the community is unhappy, they’re also split on how to react. At the most extreme end, some players are calling for a boycott, and some players are rejecting this idea as well. Content creator PhiDX explained he is bowing out for now because he isn’t up to the task of learning the game’s changes so quickly before tournaments. Others are trying out other games, like Street Fighter 6, or returning to Tekken 7. If we were to wager a guess, most unhappy players are simply not playing anything right now.
While every major fighting game actually has issues at the moment, the crash out surrounding Tekken 8 is particularly bad because of how unprecedented it is. As of this writing, SteamDB logs a player peak of 6,801 players in the last 24 hours. That’s still an active community, but a far cry from its peak of 49,977 players.
As always, we want to see Tekken’s developers do good by their community. As some in the community have pointed out, the real problem may be that this is the first Tekken in the series that spent the mandatory two years in arcades before going to PCs and consoles. We know that arcades have diminished in importance in the US, and the overall video game industry has already shifted from arcades, to PCs and consoles, to mobile.
But we can now see that Tekken benefited a lot from being played in arcades, as the developers saw the consensus from their players and worked to improve the game by the time it came to consoles. It should be easier for developers to get feedback from their community in this social media age. But because this whole situation is complicated by eSports, with the livelihood of players on the line, it isn’t as simple as the developers just trying to replicate what they have in arcades with their online community.
Hopefully, we will have better news about Tekken 8 sooner rather than later. With Street Fighter 6 looking impressive on the Nintendo Switch 2, we think Bandai Namco’s fighting game franchise could also do very well on what could be Nintendo’s return to parity with other platforms. But they’ll have to fix everything else about the game first.
You can watch TheeSports’ video below.
