Apparently not every game studio out there is enamored with engorging on greed and destroying the good will of their audience by accepting exclusivity deals where they leave a large portion of their audience wanting and out in the dust. SNK Corporation appears to be one of those studios.
During an interview on Game Focus with SNK art director, Nobuyuki Kuroki, for the upcoming Samurai Shodown, Kuroki referenced a situation with SNK president Koichi Toyama who said that a while back a PC platform holder attempted to convince them to make Samurai Shodown an exclusive on that platform. However, Toyama informed them that multi-platform releases make more money because you can move more copies, and they expected to move around 1 million copies of the game, something that wouldn’t be possible if the game had been made exclusive to one platform.
Unfortunately Game Focus doesn’t actually focus on the comments about exclusivity and instead talks more about the art-style, the gameplay, and Samurai Shodown running on the Unreal Engine 4, using an inked-filter to give the game a unique look.
Nevertheless, the comments about Toyama being requested to make Samurai Shodown exclusive gained attention after Korean enthusiast and FGC member Gatoray posted up about the interview.
‘사무라이 쇼다운’ SNK 쿠로키 노부유키 디렉터 “부담되지만 자신있어”https://t.co/kZMo5YPHJh
— Gatoray (@gatoray_kof) June 13, 2019
Now some people have been confused about the reference of the platform holder being guaranteed payment for hundreds of thousands of copies in exchange for exclusivity. What this means is that the platform holder would guarantee that ‘X’ amount of copies would be paid for on behalf of the platform. So even if they don’t move ‘X’ amount of copies organically, they would still be subsidized through the deal to make up the difference.
Plenty of other other development studios have taken similar deals with Epic Games in exchange for a year’s worth of exclusivity on the Epic Games Store for PC. Shenmue 3, in fact, was one such game and it did not go down well with Kickstarter backers at all. To make matters worse is that the developers have denied backers any sort of refunds, only fueling the rage at this point.
SNK wisely decided to avoid that kind of backlash and figured they could make bank by selling Samurai Shodown naturally to home console owners and PC gamers without that kind of drama. You can look for the upcoming fighting game to launch on PS4 and Xbox One starting June 25th, with the PC and Switch versions expected to arrive sometime in the winter.
(Thanks for the news tip Wondy Bergers)