Street Fighter X Tekken - What Happened?

hey kids just a little PSA before we get to the many bumbles and fumbles of cross Tekken if you're like me and I know I am you enjoy bashing buttons to take out evil and bosses and their many minions so I cordially invite you to check out the takeover it's a 90s era beat mop that I spent the last 4 years producing it's not on Steam for a few months and just launched on the Nintendo switch with a ps4 version coming later this summer there's four playable characters multiple endings unlockables any banging soundtrack from little V Mills and the legend himself Yuzo Koshiro it's been a passion project for a long time now and it's really exciting for me to finally see it available if you want to know more check out the video in the description for details on future versions and a physical release and now on to mr. oh noes wild and wacky ride [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to another face busting tag-teaming money-losing episode of what happened the show that asks you will you cross the line into finding out just what went down up and wronged all over with Capcom's infamous street fighter cross tekken now this is an episode that's been years in the making so make sure you've properly stretched and have all your gem set and ready to go okay 20% attack oh wait no x 5 no cuz this story is about to get downright fierce so like many of our previous jaunts through Capcom's Hall of Shame there's not exactly a whole lot of inside information from the front lines it's a secretive company that more often than not is rarely plagued by problems during actual development very few of their in-house games run into engine trouble or some other type of technical issue what does happen however is a breakdown between the developmental and marketing teams along with the bosses at the top it's why we have misfires like DMC Dead Rising 4 Bionic Commando and all the rest fortunately I was lucky enough to speak to a former staff member at Capcom USA who's right in the trenches during cross Tekken's launch narrowly at dodging fireballs time out victories and disastrous marketing gimmicks we'll be checking in with them often it all starts of course with Street Fighter 4 now it was a huge risk making this game which took Yoshinori Ono months if not years to get greenlit from those aforementioned bosses at the top fighting games despite some gems god I gotta watch it with all the gem references was certainly a genre that was in a sort of dormant phase worlds away from the sonic boom period of the so the fact that Street Fighter 4 was such a huge success in both the arcades and especially the home consoles was a big win for Capcom and just about everybody else it absolutely pushed other publishers to start developing their own fighters once again but no one was quicker to capitalize than Capcom themselves the company now happy or confident or maybe overconfident decided to start green lighting a bunch of other button bashers which kind of made sense throughout the 90s and even the early 2000s they had about 34 different fighting franchises all going on at the same time since the nineties however many other genres experienced their own boom periods so there was more competition than ever before capcom wasted no time and began dropping hints about a new fighting game in early 2010 with many people expecting a new dark stalkers ah ow I just reminded myself but what no one expected was at that year's San Diego Comic Con where Katsuhiro Harada patriarch of the Tekken clan crashed a panel held by Ohno and suddenly announced Street Fighter cross Tekken people were caught off guard in the best possible way while initially seen as a bit of an odd pairing it was nevertheless pretty damn hype to see two universes crossover now this was clearly a deal whose inception started in Japan so when Capcom USA was let in on the secret they were of course blown away but there were some concerns while it wasn't the exact crossover most of us would have imagined coming about it was still seen as a fresh and exciting concept especially considering there was going to be the Tekken version how Tekken characters would play in a Street Fighter game was definitely a question but we were writing high off the reviving of the fighting game genre just two years earlier that said there were some reservations that came about which in hindsight were the cracks that would soon form main one was the insane and mishel sales forecast which basically added together the user bases for Street Fighter and tekken at the time not considering that a there may be some overlap and be there are a bunch of own Niners who weren't going to switch over from Street Fighter 4 so yes maybe with egos slightly inflated and expectations a tad too high cross Tekken was pegged to be a big seller by Capcom but why wouldn't it be their flagship fighter was doing well Tekken 2 just launched their first game on then-current consoles so this is going to be bus slam-dunk the dragon punch or an electric win godfist right well very quickly money started to get spent and not all of it smartly Capcom contracted out another company to animate shitloads of a CGI videos maybe more than they needed instead of simply relying on their in-game musicians they splurged on licensed music that also maybe wasn't needed its 470,000 xur huh finally Namco obviously would need to see some money back in exchange for the usage of their characters so Capcom's fat stacks were quickly getting less fat so because of all these factors right off the bat this left cross Tekken in a sort of pits that was ever so slightly getting deeper and deeper but it had to crawl out of to reach profitability the former staff member I spoke to explains the budget versus forecast was done in a way that was the opposite of how it should go every time the budget would increase which would be quite a bit due to common game design bloat and things like the polygons pictures trailers the forecast would need to increase to match it without anything being added that would get us to that forecast so we found ourselves on the marketing side having to sell more copies of the game without additional tools in which to do so which as you can imagine was difficult maybe knowing this would become an issue Capcom decided they would need to take steps to combat the problem head-on and to do so they would need to increase their attack by 30% without sacrificing their speed [Music] gems were instituted as a way to offset all these costs it was something that was interwoven into the games design from a very early point even before Capcom USA was told of the crossovers existence just as a reminder for those that are fortunate enough to not know or have forgotten if you bought the special edition of the game you got an additional like 45 gems which is almost the amount that came with the base package and as a follow-up to that one to combo each brick-and-mortar store also had their own exclusive packs of gems with almost all of them being better than those [ __ ] level one versions for loser idiots I mean even even PlayStation Home was offering its own gem pack the way what was what was playstation home again hey just forget oh my god out of all the egregious DLC practices Capcom was dipping their dick into during these trying years the gem system was often seen as the most ill-conceived and transparently ingredie of them all and in a damned if you do damned if you don't type moment players could go gem las' if they wished which was good because selecting them brought the pace of tournaments to a grinding halt and were eventually banned from most majors because of this though gem DLC sales were exceedingly low because they simply boiled down to pay2win mechanics which many people tend to hate a whole bunch so they didn't quite become the cost offsetting mechanic they were designed to be which wasn't great for cross Tekken's long term goals because initially gems were meant to go on for years and years and years one of the concepts was that the gem system would become so robust that you would ostensibly have an infinite amount of fighter variations there are ideas for very powerful gems down the line that would basically turn one character into a completely different one they were thinking that each average player would spend $12 on gems in total which was aggressive at the best of time so I think it goes without same they did not hit those numbers and because event there was gym DLC for only a few months until it was quietly canceled even before launch the initial reaction of gems wasn't exactly a fan favorite but it was only the first and a long list of things that fans were very much not favorite team Street Fighter 4 on the Xbox 360 and ps3 were essentially the same game but things suddenly changed when Capcom revealed in January of 2012 that the PlayStation 3 version would receive five exclusive characters all of which would be immediately banned in all tournaments this monthly crew of combatants included two cats who were playstation mascots in Japan the dude from infamous I don't remember his name and finally two men of the pack and mega varieties now while the first three makes sense from a mascot perspective why was a Capcom and Namco icons Sony exclusives well I'm sure it was befuddling to some back then and even today but it was like a lot of things in cross tekken another way to mitigate costs capcom typically approaches both sony and microsoft early on development with the build a plan and a hope that they'll get a co marketing deal for street fighter cross tekken sony was willing to offer a ton of money for co marketing as again this is hot off the heels of a street fighter 4 as with all deals like this there were some concessions and this one was probably bigger than most because there are mostly joke characters and because it was forecast that the ps3 would have outsold the xbox 360 version anyway it seemed like it would have had minimal competitive impact in the end what didn't have minimal impact was that last character in the list Mega Man or that boxart Mega Man specifically which was its own whole huge embarrassing separate thing no this is one of those issues that was claimed of no one's fault but somehow simultaneously still everyone's fault bad box aren't Mega Man or I think he was just called Mega Man he was a victim of timing the game was being developed and when he was being added to it Mecca man was not in a bad place Mega Man universe had been anounced there was Mega Man Legends 3 and a third project was also in development was really looking like a time to celebrate Mega Man so the team wanted to have some fun with it and then the sequence of events happen where all three titles were cancelled so it turned out to be the year of the death of Mega Man then they announced him for cross tekken with him looking like bad boxer Mega Man and without that context about when and why he was developed it really looked like another slap in the face to Mega Man players so again he was a victim of timing in fact PR in general for cross tekken always seemed to run into some type of embarrassing snafu with certain ventures while maybe not hurting the actual game certainly didn't help lift the already pungent miasma that lingered since the big gem reveal okay so with that we are now reaching the third strike of cross Tekken and as I'm sure all of you are aware [Music] it's time to talk about OD DLC Xbox 360 versions released and split wide open and out toppled 12 DLC characters all on the disc all essentially finished as to why they were finished and not included in the base package well they're being held back as they were initially going to be timed exclusives for the Vita port remember the Vita port while it was scheduled to come out six months after the home console launch apparently another part of the co marketing deal with Sony now you can say a lot about cross Tekken and people have but this was such a catastrophic PR nightmare for Capcom that it changed how they did downloadable content from then on out especially for fighting games with all the other very not good press surrounding it Capcom moved up the launch of the DLC roster to July as console warriors were furious they would have to wait six months to play with characters that were already on the disk that they had paid for due to a Vita version they didn't even want hackers would even go online with these characters further adding insult to injury and I can't imagine Sony was happy about all this either this whole disaster wasn't something that took Capcom and especially Capcom USA by surprise as they correctly predicted this would happen but wouldn't you know it their fears were waved off Street Fighter cross Tekken became the poster child for on disc DLC there was a meeting between the production team in Japan and the marketing team in the u.s. we had stated people are going to find the on disc DLC because 100% of all Xbox 360 games are cracked before launch and the response said that was why would anyone crack the game that's illegal there was a long pause a very long pause and then the director of marketing replied back to event with a very blunt please remove the on disc DLC and the response to that was well if we do that we're going to have to push the game out too April or May and we'll have to tell mr. tsujimoto that was marketing's decision to push it to the next fiscal year it very well could have been true that the work needed to remove the content would have pushed them back but basically they were saying we need to have this release by the fiscal year and if not well that's gonna screw over the company and it's going to be your fault so that was pretty much a direct threat we just had to lose that battle and lose they did Calkins projections for cross tekken were two million units within the launch period but by mid-may they'd barely moved 1.4 considerably slower than the last couple of fighting games released by either Capcom or Namco and I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here but I haven't even gotten to the actual game part of all this yet because many fans especially within the fgc weren't keen on how the moment-to-moment fighting played out because of the way the tag system worked a higher than normal percentage of matches would be decided by time out then there was Pandora a heavily advertised comeback mechanic that no one wanted to come back to and don't forget the incredibly distracting sometimes unclear UI that just for a more in-depth breakdown of all the issues players had I suggest stumble B's video on the subject as it looks more at the minutiae of all the fighting mechanics that didn't quite work at launch so all these factors couple with Capcom's DLC dollar-sign dreams being shattered firmly planted cross tekken in that slippery pit with no real way to escape you can't escape what also certainly contributed to its financial failure was the competition which was an assault that came from pretty much every angle and somewhat ironically came mostly from Capcom itself remember the very same year cross Tekken was announced in 2010 Cal comm also revealed Marvel 3 and also launched ultimate all-stars and also launched Street Fighter 4 arcade edition in 2011 that's four different fighting games trying to coexist all at the same time by the same company and it simply wasn't viable with that said Capcom didn't give up entirely yeah they canceled the thousands of gems they had planned and had to blow their character DLC load early but they realized the game still had a lot of fundamental problems that they were committed to fixing this brings us to cross Tekken 2013 edition only let players knows receiving an overhaul without having to spend money on new assets or features because the last thing they wanted to do was spend more money that they weren't making this patch addressed almost all complaints players had characters rebalance the UI was fixed and made more clear the tag system and gray life adjusted for all intents and purposes this was the game that should have been available at launch and smartly Capcom made this a free update but once that update was issued that's all she wrote for cross Tekken the four new Street Fighter characters that introduced relent Oh Hugo poison and Ella no were then added to Ultra Street Fighter 4 so some smart asset reuse there in the subsequent years fans have since rallied around the game especially on PC what with its impressive modding scene growing it to an obviously small but passionate fan base this was only made possible with the positive changes seen in the 2013 update and in terms of the core fighting game people's views on cross tekken have softened because of it now as for Tekken cross Street Fighter the Tekken focused 3d sequel that was never officially announced and never officially cancelled well after the Tekken team finished Tekken 6 and then Tekken Tag Tournament 2 then Tekken 7 arcade then Tekken 3d yes then Tekken 7 feet of retribution thin taken 7 the console version we haven't really made any strong indication that they'll ever return to the concept if Capcom's attempt had been a rousing success you most likely would have seen Hirata's take by now it's odd how since this whole misfire Capcom's fighting efforts have struggled in some form or another I hope horrible ugliness won't be a distraction to you while Tekken 7 has emerges one of the most popular fighters of the last few years selling five million copies and still going strong it's fairly easy to see a pattern here Capcom tried to push out multiple fighting games often in the same year and often cannibalizing its own sales while Tekken focused on one release at a time writing out the success until they were ready to announce another the former Capcom employee sums it up best in regards to the whole unfortunate situation after all the gyms and all the on disk DLC it made us say what is going on with this game and that sort of brought up the in joke that it must have been greenlit over an ancient Native American burial ground because it was just cursed and that was the other name we had for the game which was Street Fighter curse Tekken because nothing went right with it so make no mistake the intentions here were good deliver a fighting game that many weren't expecting that featured lots of over-the-top mechanics but due to poor planning and poor budgeting and just plain old bad luck cross Tekken was the partner that got sacrificed for other fighting franchises to thrive and with that if you know of any other pugilistic punch em ups that had problematic perils let me know in the comments below or cross the line over to the flop us VIP patreon to nominate the subject of our next episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 736,602

Rating: 4.9045568 out of 5

Keywords: Street Fighter X Tekken, SFXT, Street Fighter, Tekken, Capcom, Namco, What Happened, Wha Happun, Matt McMuscles, Flophouse, Video Game Documentaries, Video Game Disasters, Fighting Games

Id: I7lsM_5wF7M

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/warjoke]

This game is a true missed opportunity for a yet another crossover gem in the making (pun intended).

Harada was once very proud of this project but everytime this is brought up in recent interviews he just want to shove the topic off and discuss something else. I seriously cannot blame him.

[u/VMK_1991]

SFxT is, to me, the saddest "what happened", because it was one of the few games that I remember being excited about.

[u/The_Draigg]

“Why would anyone crack the game? That’s illegal!”

The ghost of the Dreamcast laughs in the distance

[u/ContraryPython]

And Capcom has yet to recover from their fighting games, they’ve been doing well with their other IPs except their fighting games

[u/Shrekt115]

I remember Cole McGrath :'(

[u/HGH93]

Games for Windows Live happened for me so I never got to witness this gem in all its glory.

[u/Mutant-Overlord]

Yo remember when Sakura did tried to do a Hadouken after watching too much wrestling?