Tekken's Harada defends Miyazaki's full career, slams sales-figure thinking

Katsuhiro Harada — former Tekken boss and current CEO of SNK VS Studio — has posted a lengthy tribute to FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki on X, arguing that Miyazaki's career is widely misunderstood because people fixate on the Souls series' commercial explosion rather than the slow, deliberate development path that made it possible.

Harada describes Miyazaki as "a rather unique, yet extremely serious game developer" whose story is genuinely unusual even by industry standards. Miyazaki didn't enter game development until he was nearly 30, having worked as an Oracle account manager before Ico — recommended by a friend — convinced him to change careers entirely. Few studios were willing to take a chance on someone with no industry background, but FromSoftware did. He started as a designer on Armored Core: Last Raven, moved into a director role on Armored Core 4 and For Answer, and only then came Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Harada, who overlapped with the Souls series and Elden Ring development during his time as a Bandai Namco producer and marketing general manager, says that vantage point gave him a clear view of how FromSoftware steadily sharpened its craft across those earlier, less celebrated titles. "Dark Souls didn't suddenly become a massive success overnight," Harada said. "It was the result of everything Miyazaki and his team had built up through their previous titles."

What clearly irritates Harada is the tendency — which he attributes to people on the business side rather than fans — to evaluate games purely in terms of budget and units sold. "That's exactly what you'd expect from someone who's never actually developed games," he said of the sales-figures-first mindset. He called the current reverence for FromSoftware an "almost complete reversal in attitude" compared to the years when Miyazaki and his team were grinding through projects that got little attention or praise. The implicit target of his frustration sounds like publisher-side executives who measure creative work against earnings calls rather than craft.

Harada was explicit that he isn't criticising the fan community, and the post reads more like a long-overdue acknowledgment from one industry veteran to another than a public controversy. It's a reminder that the studios and directors who look like overnight sensations usually have a decade of unglamorous groundwork behind them — and that the people best placed to see that are the ones who were in the room at the time.