🥊 When Kohei Ikeda said goodbye to Bandai Namco in June, his farewell was warm and detailed, and left out exactly one thing: where he was going. Nobody in the fighting game world had much trouble guessing. On August 18 he confirmed it anyway, and attached a photo of three men whose names once sat together in the same block of credits.

Nearly three months of silence, ended in one post

Ikeda, better known online as Nakatsu, announced on X that he has joined VS Studio, the Tokyo developer founded by former Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada. Working with two former bosses again feels familiar in all sorts of ways, he wrote, while the pull of building something entirely new is keeping his days full. The photo showed him with Harada and Yuichi Yonemori.

Harada, attached to the series since the very first Tekken in 1994, left Bandai Namco at the end of 2025. He resurfaced in May as CEO of a new studio based in Shinagawa, Tokyo, formally called VS Studio SNK and usually shortened to VS Studio. Harada, Yonemori and an ex-Namco engineer put up the founding capital themselves, and SNK and its parent group invested afterwards. It is not a wholly owned subsidiary; the studio runs its own affairs inside the group. We covered the founding in detail here.

Ikeda walked out of Bandai Namco Studios on June 1 after 20 years, having served as game director and development producer on Tekken 8. His statement said his run leading a team as director was ending and that he meant to keep tackling new challenges as a developer. It pointedly did not say where. We wrote about that gap at the time. The answer arrived just under three months later, which in this industry counts as fast.

The people who ran Tekken 7, back in one room

The three of them go back a long way. Harada was the series' executive game director and chief producer. Yonemori was a director on it, with credits going back to Tekken Tag Tournament in 1999. Ikeda was the game director on Tekken 7 and Tekken 8. That game had all three of them on it, and now so does VS Studio.

Yonemori is the least visible of the trio to overseas audiences, which undersells him. He has worked with Harada since the 1990s, and told 4Gamer he stayed with the series through Tekken 7, until the console version was properly underway, before moving to a different company. Ikeda's route in was stranger. He was an arcade fighting game player first, then went into games media at Enterbrain, and only afterwards joined Bandai Namco, where his first credit was as a designer on Soulcalibur IV. When he calls Harada and Yonemori his former bosses, he means it fairly literally.

"VS" reads as "versus," and Harada is happy for people to take it that way, but he has explained that it also points back to the VS Development Division at old Namco, where he and Yonemori started out in the 1990s. Inside the company, that "VS" stood for Video game Soft.

What they are actually building has not been announced. Harada has said in interviews that, given what the market and SNK will expect, a game where people compete against each other is unavoidable, while carefully declining to promise that it will be a fighting game.

Why the celebration isn't unanimous

Most of the reaction has run one way: legendary creators escape a big publisher, reunite, and get to chase the thing they actually want to make. That reading isn't wrong.

It skips something, though. Ikeda was the person leading Tekken 8 through the roughest stretch of its life. Season 2 pushed the game toward relentless offense and drew backlash severe enough that Bandai Namco replaced the balance team outright. Season 3 was pitched in February as a return to fundamentals, landed in March, and went over so badly it triggered a review bomb; the team publicly conceded that what players got was not what it had set out to deliver.

So the response on forums like ResetEra has been layered rather than celebratory. Some posters argue the aggression-first design philosophy came down from the publisher as much as from the team, and that Ikeda deserves a cleaner slate. Others are openly skeptical that the same people will suddenly produce better balance somewhere else. There are jokes about a legally distinct Tekken emerging from an SNK-funded studio, and there are less jocular questions about a new studio absorbing this much of a rival team in under four months. The SNK ownership question is still circulating in the same threads too, as it has since May. SNK has operated since 2020 under long-term backing from Middle Eastern capital.

The optimistic case is simply the résumés. Whatever anyone thinks of Tekken 8's balance patches, this is a group whose credits on 3D fighting games run back three decades, and a debut project from them is worth paying attention to. That view and the skeptical one are both currently arguing about a game nobody has seen.

Bandai Namco keeps the name. VS Studio has the people.

Tekken itself is running on schedule. Bob went out to Season Pass 3 holders on August 19 in North America and August 20 in other regions, with general release on the 24th and 25th. Roger Jr. and Yujiro Hanma, the guest fighter from Baki, are still to come as the remaining Season 3 characters. Arslan Ash took the Tekken 8 title at Evo 2026, and the Tekken World Tour Finals head to Singapore from January 14 to 17, 2027, at Evo Singapore.

As of August 20, 2026, Bandai Namco has still not publicly named a new game director. The company keeps the trademark, the roster, the tournament circuit and the release calendar. What it no longer has is Harada, Yonemori and Ikeda.

Whether that matters is an open question. Big franchises have survived losing the people most identified with them before. But it is a strange arrangement to look at: the name in one building, and the memory of why the name means anything in another, working on something nobody has announced.

When the people who built a franchise you love all end up somewhere else, do you follow the logo or the credits? And where you live, does a move like this get written up as a personal success story, or as a warning about the company they left?

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