Tekken's Harada 'Not Really Worried' About Market Saturation

Is the Tekken series is in danger of oversaturating the market? Publisher Namco Bandai recently released Tekken Hybrid for the PlayStation 3, and there are five other announced projects in the series: Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (PS3/Xbox 360), Tekken 3D Prime Edition (Nintendo 3DS), a Tekken for Wii U, and two collaborations with Capcom: Street Fighter X Tekken and Tekken X Street Fighter. Chief producer Katsuhiro Harada is "not really worried about that," he told Gamasutra. He sees enough demand for the different titles in an expanded market -- even for a hardcore franchise like Tekken. "The reason for that is because, back in the day when we used to make the previous Tekkens, it was mainly focused on one platform, be it the arcade or PlayStation hardware. Plus the user base was much more narrow; it tended to be 20 year old males," Harada said. "But now we've noticed there's a broadening of the player base, where they're anywhere between 20 and 40 years of age, and you have various different hardware that are very viable platforms at the same time." That has lead to a strategy for the series: "We really want to give players many different chances to play on different hardware that they own -- or in a particular situation, whether it be on the go, or at their house, or such. So that's really the reason behind announcing some Tekken titles for different platforms." Given that the series has been around since the mid 1990s, said Harada, it's forced the team to think about different player groups. The audience is "pretty much the same people that continue, with younger people coming in as well," he said. "You tend to get younger groups playing the game in the arcades, heavily focused on versus gameplay. Whereas as they tend to get older, they enjoy the movies and the visual content that's included on the game disc more so than the versus gameplay." The full interview with Harada is due tomorrow on Gamasutra.