Tekken boss says younger players prefer team games so they can shift responsibility if they lose

Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada has claimed younger players are more interested in team-based games than one-on-one fighting games because it gives them less responsibility if they lose.

In the latest edition of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Game Maker’s Notebook podcast, Harada discussed with PlayStation‘s Shuhei Yoshida about the Tekken series.

At one point, Yoshida asked Harada for his opinion on how the one-on-one fighting game can evolve in the future.

Harada replied that the genre will have to find ways to integrate more team-based competition, because that’s what the younger generation of players tends to favour.

“It seems to me that the way fighting games are played has evolved over time, with the generations,” Harada explained.

“In Japan, and probably in most of the world, my generation is a big one. It makes up a good chunk of the population. That made our society a competitive one.

“If you applied to a school or for a job, there was always a lot of competition. Because of this, people in my generation prefer definitive outcomes, a clear winner and loser. This applies to folks in and around their 50s.

“But most young people nowadays are the opposite. They’re rarely eager to engage in one-on-one showdowns. Plus, because figthing games pit you by yourself against a single opponent, you have to accept all the responsibility if you lose. You can’t blame anyone else.

“In team-based shooters, when players win, they can say that they won because of their own contributions, but when they lose, it’s because they got matched with a lousy team.”

“Some games even give out individual awards to each and every player,” Yoshida adds.

Harada goes on to say that he’s been thinking about how to incorporate this cultural shift into the fighting genre to help make it appeal to the younger generation of players.

“I’m not saying we should suddenly turn a fighting game into a puzzle game, or a real-time strategy game,” he says. “I still think there’s demand for games like this, this sort of hand-to-hand fighting.

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“But maybe we could include other ways of competing, outside of the main game. For example, maybe they don’t always have to fight one-on-one. They could opt for team battles, such as 3-on-3 matches.

“I think we may want to incorporate this into the online mode’s official rankings. Maybe team matches could have positions within a team, something like the order of teammates in judo matches.

“Right now, in Tekken’s online mode, each player fights alone, battle after battle, just trying to climb the rankings. Maybe with more varied modes based on things like teams or regions, it could add more meta-gaming as well.”