Stop judging games by their sales figures, says Tekken's Katsuhiro Harada: “That’s exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s never actually developed games"

Katsuhiro Harada, the legendary Tekken director now leading SNK VS Studio, pushed back against using sales figures as the primary metric for judging games. He made the comments while praising Hidetaki Miyazaki and FromSoftware, noting that Miyazaki entered game development later in his career after working on several underperforming titles before Dark Souls launched the studio into mainstream success.

Harada's position cuts to a fundamental disconnect between commercial performance and creative merit. Sales numbers reflect market timing, marketing budgets, platform availability, and consumer trends as much as they reflect game quality. A title might sell poorly due to poor positioning or release window while maintaining critical acclaim and devoted player bases. Conversely, a commercially successful game might leverage franchise recognition rather than innovative design.

The fight game veteran emphasized that evaluating development talent based purely on revenue misses the point entirely. Developers learn from projects that don't hit commercial targets. They refine their craft through iteration and experimentation. FromSoftware's trajectory illustrates this perfectly. Before Dark Souls established the studio's soulslike template, Miyazaki worked on titles that didn't dominate sales charts. Yet those projects contributed to the design philosophy and technical knowledge that made the Souls series revolutionary.

Harada's comment about people judging games by sales being "exactly what you'd expect from someone who's never actually developed games" carries particular weight. It's an industry insider calling out surface-level analysis. Development teams understand that a game's impact extends beyond first-week revenue or lifetime sales. Critical reception, player retention, community engagement, and influence on future projects matter equally.

This perspective matters especially in an industry where pressure for blockbuster returns increasingly influences greenlight decisions. Mid-tier and experimental projects get squeezed when publishers fixate on sales benchmarks. Harada's defense of projects