Hiya!

So, some sad fighting game related news came out recently. SNK‘s CEO, Kenji Matsubara, has stepped down as the CEO for the company. While no official reason was given in the official press release, it’s hard to deny the timing is suspicious as SNK just released their latest and long-awaited fighting game, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.

Although the game had been received with general praise from critics and fighting game fans, the sales numbers, at least for physical copies in Japan, hasn’t been exceptionally high. Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves’ sales number has just been comparable to SNK’s earlier fighting games, such as King of Fighters XV and Samurai Shodown.

While that in itself shouldn’t be cause for alarm or, at the very least, cause a CEO of a company to step down, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves does feel like the exception because of how much they seem to be dumping money into marketing it and I think this is actually a huge problem within SNK. Simply put, I believe SNK is spending marketing muscle and money recklessly as it looks like they have no real idea on how to promote the game correctly.

To kind of paint a picture on what I mean by this, let’s go check out the very first announcement. For that, we have to go way back to EVO 2023. Looking back, it was a very unassuming trailer. They didn’t show any gameplay. They didn’t even show any character models. No, all the revealed was key promotion art, some recognizable background music and the announcement that a “New Fatal Fury/Garou Greenlit!” That’s it! That’s all it took for the fighting game world to lose their minds! In other words, they started out strong.

As time moved on and the game got closer to its release, weird things started to creep out. The strangeness began with the Cristiano Ronaldo teaser trailer. To the Western fighting game community at large, their biggest question was “who the heck is Cristiano Ronaldo?” That felt a little weird to me because, although I know very little about fulbol, I do know he’s a pretty popular player. Still, the teaser seemed to come out of nowhere because what the heck does Cristiano Ronaldo have to do with the Fatal Fury series. Is he just going to be a paid spokeperson for City of the Wolves? That’s weird in itself but… fine. Whatever.

Well, it turns out SNK didn’t just hire Cristiano Ronaldo to hawk the game. No, he wasn’t going to be promoting City of the Wolves. He was going to be in City of the Wolves! In one of the weirdest decisions made, SNK made Cristiano Ronaldo a full-fledged character you can pick. He wasn’t DLC or anything like that. No, he was in the base roster beating out beloved Fatal Fury fighters like Blue Mary and Yamazaki! This felt rather insulting, especially to those who have been waiting for a new Fatal Fury game!

The oddball character choices kept on coming as another real-world person (kinda) was revealed later. Salvatore Ganacci, a supposedly popular DJ, was then teased by SNK. By this time, fans knew he was going to be the next real-world character to enter Fatal Fury and the fighting game community proverbially lost their minds… but not in a good way.

While his teaser trailer was humorous and, well, pretty endearing, most people had the same problem with him getting a slot and not a previous Fatal Fury character. This irked many people, including myself, as it looked like SNK was just adding people without any rhyme or reason. Unlike Cristiano Ronaldo, I had no idea who this Salvatore Ganacci fellow was! Thankfully, as SNK leaned into making him a “joke” character (and rightfully so) and it looked like even Salvatore Ganacci was in on the joke, I did warm up to the character and I even apologized for hating on him early on.

It was all downhill from there.

While Cristiano Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci probably got some eyes to look at the latest Fatal Fury as their fans would like to check it out, I bet getting them in the game wasn’t cheap. I mean, the mere fact SNK probably had to license their likeness and model them into City of the Wolves, that must’ve cost them a pretty penny. It didn’t matter if either of them actually wanted to be in the game! They still wanna get paid! On that note, may I suggest you all go out and get yourself a physical copy of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. Why? Well, that’s because licensing agreements tend to have a time limit. So, there may be a time when those digital copies of the game might omit these characters because SNK no longer can use them! Think of this as a future investment idea.

Even with that, SNK still poured a lot of money into their marketing efforts but in ways which were counterproductive to a fighting game. They dumped in a lot of cash to get IShowSpeed and KSI to, get this, promote a boxing grudge match between Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jr. because it seemed as if SNK was a primary sponsor for the fight in order to promote City of the Wolves. They even nicknamed the fight “Fatal Fury” to hammer the idea home.

The promo video was pretty cringe, with IShowSpeed, Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jr. entering the digitized world of Fatal Fury, which means they had to create 3D models based on their likeness! They even build a set of a fake SNK corporate office for this! Honestly, this scared me because, if SNK can put Cristiano Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci in City of the Wolves, what’s going to stop them from putting IShowSpeed and a couple of real-life boxers in it as well? This made me think they were testing the waters if they should or shouldn’t!

The ridiculous promotion ideas marched on as SNK also got Salvatore Ganacci to show up at this year’s Wrestlemania. While it was a blast to see anything Fatal Fury related at Wrestlemania, this just felt very out of place. To most wrestling fans, specifically who don’t know anything about Fatal Fury legacy and Salvatore Ganacci, probably saw this and thought “What is this crap? Where’s my choreographed fights?” or something to that effect. Side note: I can make fun of how wrestling is fake because I still love wrestling because it’s fake. Anyway, I bet SNK paid a ton of money for this spot and, in all likelihood, this didn’t help get people who weren’t interested in fighting games to even look at what this was all about.

We now come to the present. Kenji Matsubara has just stepped down as SNK’s CEO and that’s most probably because of City of the Wolves’ less than exceptional sales numbers. Even with that idea rattling in people’s heads, SNK is still pumping money into weird and unnecessary crossover promotions. In April, they started getting various DJs from all over the world to create music tracks for the game. For their latest marketing hubris, SNK are collaborating with “popular” music artists like Ado and MILLI to… honestly, I’m not sure. They’re just singing something and then slapping on some Fatal Fury gameplay in the music video? What is going on?

Honestly, marketing a fighting game should be very simple. Make a good fighting game and then let pro players who are good at fighting games hype it up. That’s it! If you do this, you’ll grab the majority of the fighting game community and you’ll have a loyal customer base willing to play the game. SNK already got the “good fighting game” part down with Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. They also managed to attract the pro players at the start.

So, why are they doing all of this extra unnecessary stuff? I get the idea is to get new players who have never played a Fatal Fury game before but I don’t think what they’re doing is working. In fact, I think it’s having the opposite effect and it may be turning off fighting game fans who may have been interested in picking up City of the Wolves. All of this extra fluffy promotion is detracting from how good City of the Wolves is and it reeks of desperation. It’s like SNK is trying to be “cool” by getting “cool” people to be connected with the game. That just feels like the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme. It feels so fake and forced!

Thankfully, I do think SNK has some time to turn things around and they will have the opportunity to regain the trust and the hype later on in City of the Wolves’ life when the next batch of DLC characters, which just so happen to include Street Fighter 6‘s Chun-Li and Ken Masters, comes out in the future. People are already excited at the prospect so you know it’ll get more people who love Street Fighter 6 to try out City of the Wolves.

You just know once these characters drop, there will be an influx of both new players and returning gamers who dropped the game to start replaying City of the Wolves. When this happens, all SNK has to do is let the gameplay speak for itself. There’s no need to get some musician compose a song about Ken and Chun-Li or something like that. Let the people who enjoy a good fighting game enjoy the game and then let word of mouth and hype promote the game for you. You already have a good game, SNK. Let it be your advocate.

Like I said, it’s not that complicated.

Byee!

What do you think of how SNK is promoting Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves? Let me know in the comments section below!