Tekken's Director may have slyly teased his prediction for Street Fighter 6's release date
Fighting game developers are a bit different than the rest of the industry, considering the competitors seem more open to sharing information to improve titles and features than in other genres, but they obviously aren't going to tell each other everything.
Longtime Tekken Director Katsuhiro Harada recently danced around the "danger zone" of predicting future fighting game release dates where he ends up teasing his guess for Street Fighter 6.
In the recent Harada's Bar episode, he states that companies don't share specific dates with each other, and Bandai Namco is the same way. The guy's been around for decades though.
"But we have moments where it's like, 'you pretty much know, right?" said Harada about what he's learned over the years. "We'll be like, 'give us a little space around then?' you get moments like that. We can tell from each other's behavior. You can tell from how busy they are.
We used to all go out drinking together a certain time of year, so if they say, 'sorry, my hands are full right now,' we can tell what they mean."
The Bandai Namco boss man is first asked about a new Virtua Fighter since his partner seems to think that he knows something, but he apparently has no idea when the next VF is coming.
That's not the case with Street Fighter 6, however, because the Tekken Director says he knows and "can totally tell."
"Look for example, when you have neighbors, you know what time they head to work in the morning and stuff like that," said Harada. "If you play sports, you usually know what rival teams are practicing, so you'll know on that level."
What he appears to be referring to here in SF6's case is Capcom's generally consistency with big new fighting game release dates.
Street Fighter 4, Street Fighter X Tekken, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Street Fighter 5 all released (on console) between February 15 and March 6 in their respective years while Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 3 initially launched in the first week of February in arcades.
That's a distinct pattern going back over a decade with the only notable outlier being Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, which hit shelves in September 2017.
Harada's words here likely indicate he believes Capcom is going to continue that trend for Street Fighter 6, or he can gauge how far long the developers are based on what they're currently showing and doing.
If the latter option is the case though, the game may be shaping up to launch at a different time.
The February–March window lines up with our current predictions for when SF6 will release, but Capcom themselves are sticking with the vague "2023" date.
There are going to be a couple of good opportunities for Capcom to tell fans when exactly SF6 is coming this month since the game will be present at both Tokyo Game Show and EGX 2022, but the first is probably more likely with there already being a confirmed trailer planned for TGS.
You can check out the full discussion below where the talk about release dates begins around the 8-minute mark.
