SNK’s CEO has been demoted, days after the release of their latest game, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.
Kenji Matsubara is a longtime executive in the video game industry, working in companies like Tecmo, Zynga, and Sega, before joining SNK to become its president in 2021. This was a year before SNK announced they were making a Fatal Fury game in EVO. While SNK talked about making a new Fatal Fury since 2005, it’s clear that Matsubara had a lot of input in the game’s direction.
SNK shared this statement regarding Matsubara’s demotion:
SNK today announced that Mr. Kenji Matsubara will transition to an advisory role, where he will continue to lend his expertise and vision.
During his tenure as CEO, Mr. Matsubara has been instrumental in driving the company’s growth and innovation.
He transformed SNK by expanding its development division and strengthening its sales and marketing functions, building it into a global publisher capable of competing worldwide.
As part of this transition, the board will appoint the Chairman of the board to assume the interim role of CEO.
As reported by Vice, there’s a common perception that Matsubara’s transition to an advisor happened because Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves must have flopped. While SNK has not yet shared sales numbers, this assumption is based on the game’s low concurrent player numbers on SteamDB.
There are also questions to what extent that SNK’s owner, the MiSK Foundation, is involved in the game’s development. Also known as the Mohammed bin Salman Foundation, they own over 96 % of the company’s shares, giving them potentially more leverage than some CEOs in their own game companies.
The reasons fans and games press believe the Saudis directly involved themselves in development was the perplexing addition of two guest characters, football player Cristiano Ronaldo and DJ Salvatore Gannacci. Both are closely connected to the Saudi government, so their additions appear to have been done at the behest of the owners.
VG 24/7 Alex Donaldson shared another interesting claim on Bluesky:
when someone connected to this game’s development told me how many copies the new Saudi brass expected it to sell I actually laughed out loud
But then, there are other ideas that SNK fans are exploring regarding the game’s financial prospects. YouTuber and FGC player Carls493 shared this claim on Twitter:
According to my Bluesky feed, the biggest factor of COTW’s struggling sales is neither because of CR7 nor DJ Man…. …It’s because this game’s price is ATROCIOUS in LATAM territories, some of SNK’s biggest markets. That’s gonna hurt them harder than including those IRL guests.
At the end of the day, there is no proof that Matsubara’s demotion is connected to Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves’ launch sales. Subsequently, in spite of the red flags, there’s also no definite evidence that SNK’s Saudi owners made decisions that harmed this project, or even that they mandated the guest characters.
But fans of SNK games, especially older players who grew up with Fatal Fury (like Masahiro Sakurai), it’s certainly a shame that the latest game in the franchise is now the subject of this speculation. It’s definitely not the big return to the franchise that SNK and its fans would have hoped. Given how much eSports is now incorporated in the fighting game genre, it’s possible that Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves finds its way when it joins the eSports circuit, but for now, its launch falls under a dark cloud that we’re not sure the actual product, and the work of SNK developers, really deserves.
