While Soulcalibur VI staff haven’t been shy in how much the game is meant to please longtime fans and how they’re prioritizing building the game into a robust experience via direct fan-feedback, instead of focusing on eSports.
Now, we’ve learned the sales on the game will directly affect the franchise. When speaking at this year’s Gamescom (via Dualshockers), producer Motohiro Okubo noted the sales of the game will literally determine the future of the franchise.
When asked if this could be the last Soulcalibur game in the worst-case scenario that it sells poorly, Okubo said “Yeah, that’s right.”
He continued by explaining the IP was in a bad spot within the company. “The first thing is that the IP itself of the SoulCalibur franchise had low expectations from the company. It was actually facing a crisis of maybe disappearing. It took time for me to convince the company.”
When the interviewer mentioned that fans better buy the game, Okubo then switched to speaking directly in English – saying he isn’t trying to push fans to buy the game, but he certainly hopes so. “We don’t want to blackmail the users by saying that it could be the last one, but as it is, yes.”
The subject of fanservice and scantily clad ladies naturally came up in regards to development of the game. Okubo was asked if they had pushback when maintaining fanservice seen in previous games.
“Since the SoulCalibur brand is facing a crisis, we have nothing to lose, so we just decided to do what we want to do,” Okubo said. He also talked up whether or not they purposefully designed characters to be sexy from the get-go.
“It’s not like we’re trying to make the characters sexy,” Okubo said. “When we decide on the costumes, we always think about how best they can represent the characters. Sometimes there may be less fabric and as a result, the character may be sexier, but we’re not trying to make the game focused on sexy characters.”
In case you missed it, our 30+ minutes of hands-on direct-feed footage with the game at E3 can be found here.
Soulcalibur VI is launching across Windows PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 19th.
