I Owe Harada and Michael Murray an Apology 

You're exactly right. I think this is something all us Tekken players, including myself, need to remember when we have grievances with the game. At the end of the day, we all know that Harada and the rest of the development team is doing their best to make a great game for us by fighting back against Bandai Namco, and we should appreciate that.

Well that's the really rediculous part about all of this. From the tweet Harada made the other day, he pretty much says outright that Bandai Namco is filled with a bunch of out of touch executives that have no idea how the gaming industry works, and the failures of SoulCalibur are a direct result of Bandai Namco's orginizational structure and policies. Tekken has only survived for this long because the Tekken team managed to remove themselves from Bandai Namco's own internal policies on management and production. Christ, if it wasn't for Harada doing that there may be no 3D fighting games left at all. Bamco still owns the IP, of course, so they still get a say in a lot of stuff (for example, based on these tweets it's clear that the microtransactions were a Bamco decision and not a Tekken decision), but SoulCalibur has been more or less sabotaged by Bamco over the past 2 decades not intentionally, but by the companies own insane internal policies that have no regard for the video game industry, it's employees, or their chosen career path. Because of this, if a SoulCalibur 7 was to be made, it would probably be a great game made by a passionate group of developers (just like SC6). However, because of these policies, if SC7 was successful the producer would probably be forced out of game development into a managerial role as a "promotion" in line with Bamco's policies. Project Soul would once again cease to exist, and then it would be up to someone else higher up in the company to put their career on the line to procude another SoulCalibur game. I can almost guarantee this is what happened with Okubo, and why he left Project Soul to work at Cygames, as otherwise he would have been forced into a position at Bamco that is completely outside of game development (not as a punishment, but as a reward). Bandai Namco is just a god awful company, and until there is some serious change at the upper levels of management and their own policies, this is going to be a cycles that continues infinitely. I'm hopeful that SC7 will release eventually, there are still plenty of people from Project Soul that work at Bandai Namco, but the hoops they have to jump through and the amount they have to fight back against their own company not to get approval to make the game, but just to organize themselves without interferance from people that don't know anything about the gaming industry is insane.

@@sesujin It's like fighting your* own controller because of Stick drift.

@@WARLORD626 God I love this analogy, it's perfect.

I'm hearing a similar sentiment from a lot of people talking to me about this. Hell, I feel the same way in many regards. It makes me even more glad that Harada put out his giant statement on Bandai Namco few days ago. It isn't just about SoulCalibur, it's about all of Bandai Namco's IPs being put under the thumb of some morons that don't know anything about the industry, and it's important we realize the fault lies with those people, not the developers at Bamco. I've brought this up a couple of times, but Armor Core is another prime and recent example of these executives absolutely trashing a series for no reason other then they cannot properly evaluate their own games and IPs (Harada's words, not mine). Hopefully their recent failure will cause them as a company to look inwards and rethink their internal policies, it's the only way that this stops happening.