How SNK will bring back a golden age, with help from Cristiano Ronaldo | Kenji Matsubara interview

Kenji Matsubara joined SNK three years ago as CEO of a Japanese game company with a rich heritage in fighting games like King of Fighters.

This year, at the Tokyo Game Show, his company showed off Fatal Fury, whose last installment as a video game was 26 years ago. This is what it means to try to bring back the golden age of SNK. Matsubara was hired by a new set of bosses: the Saudis. The crown prince turned out to be a big fan of SNK”s games. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Misk Foundation acquired SNK and Toei Animation as part of a move into the game industry. His mission was to grow the business.

Matsubara was able to grow the company from 200 people to 600 now, but he isn’t in a huge rush. Rather, the investment is a measured push that will bring back the company’s older franchises and launch some new ones as well. The company has added a Tokyo office in addition to its Osaka team, as well as a new studio in China. Matsubara doesn’t want to grow too fast, but he also wants to make a significant impact on SNK’s future. He thinks it’s important to grow but maintain the company’s culture.

There are still more ways to grow. The company could expand in Europe and North America as it seeks a larger global footprint. Matsubara also said the company’s recent teaser with soccer legend Cristiano Rolando could also draw a lot of interest to the company’s games.

I met Matsubara eight years ago when I last went to Japan for work. He was then working at Sega, and he was on a panel I moderated during a Tokyo visit and he reminded me of our encounter by showing me a picture. It slipped my mind, but he didn’t forget. It was a nice personal touch that gave me an insight into him. I interviewed him at SNK’s headquarters in Tokyo ahead of the Tokyo Game Show.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: I thought it would be good to get some context for how SNK has been able to grow in recent years, especially when so much of the rest of the game industry has had a hard time. How has your strategy helped lead to a better outcome at the moment?

Kenji Matsubara: I entered SNK about three years ago. At the time we only had our one office in Osaka. We didn’t even have an office in Tokyo. We only had a couple of hundred people, so it was still a small company. However, recently Saudi Arabia had purchased the company. That helped us with our growth. They chose me to take charge.

Before entering SNK, I did a lot of work with a lot of different companies globally – American companies, Japanese companies. I had a lot of experience, but not working with Saudi Arabia at that point. That was a new experience for me. When I was speaking to the prince about why they had purchased SNK, it turned out he was a big fan of our titles, even back in the ‘90s. A huge fan of our different IPs. He felt that at the time it was a golden age. SNK was one of the shining examples of a popular game company in that era. One of the reasons they became our parent company is that they wanted to bring back that golden age. That’s why they brought me on, to be able to lead that charge at SNK.

After I became CEO, I wanted to make sure that dream came true, that vision the prince had for SNK, bringing back the glory days of SNK. We set up a big goal to be one of the top entertainment companies in 10 years from when we first discussed the plan. I wanted to accomplish that one step at a time, rather than just going for this big goal all at once. Slowly making plans and movements. In that 10 years’ time, we want to become a bigger company, but from the start, for example, we put together a three-year plan. A lot of my past experience helped with putting together these plans. I used a lot of that experience to figure out how we’re going to achieve that growth. It’s been two years now, and we’re still putting the plan into action, coming up with the next steps.

To go into a few more details of that plan, specifically SNK has focused on fighting games for many years at this point. Fighting games have a tendency to have a lot of hardcore fans in general, more so than other genres. We have a lot of fans who really love these games, but we have so many different IPs at SNK, so many different series that we maybe haven’t been using lately to make new titles. There’s a lot of potential there. We want to focus on other titles as well, like action games, not just fighting games, so we can realize our full potential. I want to start by making movements in those different genres and different IPs that aren’t necessarily fighting games. Our development teams are currently working on revitalizing different IPs and different genres we maybe haven’t touched in a while.

SNK has a lot of potential and our dev teams have a lot of experience, but we need to start by revitalizing the company – for example, by employing new rules or updating different regulations. We’re telling all the SNK employees about this great potential we have, but we have to start on things like working with HR, working with each team to make sure that we’re a cohesive company that fits into the new image I have. We’re updating our greenlight process for new titles and making sure that there’s a better flow, a better structure to the company that we maybe didn’t have before. There are basic company rules and regulations we need to keep working on to make sure we achieve future growth and potential that I believe we have.

GamesBeat: How many people work for SNK now? How have you enabled new teams to come together?

Matsubara: We have more than 600 employees at the moment. We have offices in Osaka and Tokyo in Japan. We also have a Chinese studio, as well as offices in Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan. For dev studios, we have a studio in Osaka, two in Tokyo, and one in China.

For the Osaka studio, they continue to work on our classic IP, the games everyone knows and loves. They continue to make fighting games, since that’s a big pillar for us, as well as bringing some of our IPs to new genres that they’ve never touched before. That’s going to be a big task for them. For Tokyo, about two years ago we started that studio. Tokyo is working on new IP, triple-A titles featuring brand-new IP for SNK. It’s not like Osaka, which is working on our beloved older IP.

We also have a retro studio working on retro titles. The retro team started up very recently. They’ll be making a lot of remakes, reboots, and ports. That’s going to be their focus going forward. The Chinese studio is working on using our existing IP to make mobile games, mobile versions of classic SNK as well as mobile games with new IP. That’s their main goal.

GamesBeat: Who is making Fatal Fury, then?

Matsubara: That’s Osaka, yes. They make a lot of our fighting games, focusing on our traditional titles.

GamesBeat: For that game, it’s the first entry in the series in about 26 years. How do you approach creating demand for that, given that a lot of gamers today weren’t alive when the last game came out? Do you feel like you need to modernize it in any way for modern gamers? Do you maybe want to bring back classic titles and revisit franchises more often in the future?

Matsubara: When you compare fighting games to other genres, there’s a potentially larger player base for action, adventure, more generally popular genres. We want to bring back that golden age of fighting games and bring back the player base. We want to continue to help grow that player base for fighting games in general. That’s going to be a big thing for us, bringing more people into the fold for fighting games with our marketing and promotions. People who maybe weren’t fighting game fans before.

We noticed that other companies like Capcom and Namco–with their fighting games, they’re adding content in their games that isn’t necessarily just focused on core fighting game fans, but that other fans could be interested in as well. We want to do more of that going forward, having some aspects of the game that would bring in fans that aren’t just there for fighting games. In addition, esports is a huge pillar for us. That’s another part of our marketing, a way to create a lot of hype for our games. Esports is incredibly important to us here at SNK. We’re always at the Evo events. We run a lot of tournaments ourselves. We want to bring all of our titles to esports as much as possible and show people what’s really interesting about our games through these tournaments.

To go a bit more into esports, we’re running the SNK World Championships. That’s a big event for us. For the first time, in our previous tournament, we brought the finals to America. We were in Hollywood, Los Angeles. That was big, to bring SNK and esports to a global audience. We’re currently planning our next event, and we’d also like to bring the finals to North America. We’re trying to make it a big event for a lot of different players that the media can cover, a big event for esports and the game industry in general.

Last year King of Fighters was also chosen as part of the esports Olympics event we were a part of in Asia. For King of Fighters to be chosen, that was very important for Japan, for SNK, and for gaming in general. I feel that esports is going to be a big part of our marketing moving forward, and especially for the upcoming Fatal Fury, to bring it to more people than ever. Of course, Saudi Arabia will support us on that, bringing esports and Fatal Fury to as many people as possible through tournaments.

GamesBeat: The Saudi relationship seems very appropriate. They’re very interested in esports as well. That’s a strategic alignment.

Matsubara: I heard you were at the Esports World Cup. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to meet up there, but I was at the finals as well. It was great to hear that they’re doing more moving forward, focusing on the Olympics. Saudi Arabia has a lot of plans for esports, and we definitely want to continue to work with them to ramp up our esports efforts and have more titles be a part of their esports events. That’s going to be an important way for us to bring our titles and SNK to a more global level. That’s a big next step for us.

GamesBeat: I’ve been thinking a lot about where the talent in the game industry is around the world. It’s been interesting to watch Saudi Arabia’s approach. With Manga Productions, they bought into Toei here in Japan and then brought a lot of Toei’s animation experts to Saudi Arabia. They were training a lot of their people in Saudi Arabia. More than half of the new hires at Manga Productions were from this program, and they were mostly women. It was an interesting way for them to generate talent. Do you have some of the same opportunities to train more people and grow the talent base like they want to? Creating more jobs in Saudi Arabia, either directly or indirectly, through these accelerator programs.

Matsubara: We’re part of the same parent company as Manga Productions, and I’m very familiar with what’s going on there, the process at the moment. Currently, we’re bringing people from Saudi Arabia to work at our Osaka office. That’s already moving. Some of our people are working over in Saudi Arabia full time as well. It’s a bit different from what you’re talking about, but that’s where we are at the moment.

In the future, I think there will be a phase that’s relevant to what you’re talking about, helping them train people in Saudi Arabia. Not at the moment, but that may be a potential phase in the future. Currently we’re working with Misk on their internship efforts. We’re going to continue to work with them in that regard. We want to keep working with them in the future on things like this, and there may be an effort in the future around something similar to what you’ve described.

GamesBeat: I never thought we would come to a point where we had too many games. There are a few million in the app stores now, as well as user-created games on platforms like Roblox. There have always been winners and losers in the game industry, but after the pandemic, a lot of American and European companies expanded very fast. A lot of companies in the U.S. and Europe hired a lot of people, and then they hit a slowdown. They’ve been laying off a lot of people more recently. I’m not sure we’ve seen that as much in Japan, and I wonder what the difference is. In hindsight, it feels like the American and European companies greenlit a lot of games, but didn’t have enough talent and quality behind each one. But I’m not sure about the cause and effect involved in what we’re seeing in the industry right now. I wonder what your thoughts are.

Matsubara: I feel like there are two big reasons for this. After the pandemic, many companies in the west, as you mentioned, grew very large and then had this layoff period. One reason I think not a lot of Japanese companies went through the same–in Japan there’s a culture we have around trying to make a company bigger, but maintaining the company culture, making sure that sticks around. Scaling up, but keeping that culture alive is very important. Once you make the company bigger, you make sure you’re doing it all as a team. You’re keeping all the teams connected together as you scale up, finding ways to keep that company culture alive throughout the process.

At the same time, I also note that a lot of Japanese companies just didn’t grow as big or as quickly as some in North America and Europe. There wasn’t necessarily as much to shed afterward. At a lot of Japanese companies, the focus isn’t to become really big all at once. It’s to continue to be able to get a product out to fans over a longer period of time. We’re going forward for the long haul, as opposed to more immediate growth. There are good and bad aspects to that, of course, and I’m sure companies in the west have their own feelings about that. But because of that, we’re not seeing as much shrinkage. We’re seeing slower growth, but not as many layoffs.

GamesBeat: What’s your road map and strategy for new IP and taking your existing franchises into the future? What is SNK’s future like in the near term, as well as the long term?

Matsubara: As I mentioned before, I started working here about three years ago. We created a mid-term plan about two years ago at this point. Specifically, I want to increase our pipeline of titles in general, with more output of SNK titles on a regular basis. That’s bringing existing SNK IP to new genres, and also creating all-new IP as well. We’re not mentioning any specific titles, but we’re looking at having some of these games coming out in 2026, 2027, 2028. They need several years of development. This would be for new and existing IP.

Meanwhile, we’re trying to ramp up our dev teams and increase employee numbers overall. We want to become more global in general, especially with our development efforts. We’ve licensed out different titles in the past, and now we want to work with our marketing team and our western sales and business team to do more work in those areas globally – doing sales work globally, doing marketing work globally. That’s a task we have here at the company. We currently don’t have offices in North America or Europe, so there’s still a lot that we need to do moving forward to become a global company. We hope to create new offices in those regions to support our publishing efforts, especially in the west. And of course we want to ramp up our development opportunities and other opportunities with our M&A team. That’s the full road map in a nutshell.

Recently we announced that we’re working with Cristiano Ronaldo. That’s a big partnership for us. That’s thanks in large part to the prince and our parent company. That’s helped us set up the sponsorship that we’ve recently announced. We’ll be sharing more details in the future, but this is big not only for us at SNK, but for Fatal Fury as an IP in general. It’s going to be huge for the game and the company. Because we’re working with one of the biggest superstars in soccer, that’s exciting for everyone here. We’re looking forward to doing more with him in the future.

I worked at Sega for about six years. Sega has become a very global company. They’ve bought multiple companies in Europe, and of course they have offices in North America and Europe. They have thousands of people working on games, even in Europe. We’d like to get to that level in the near future and do something similar at SNK. We have some catching up to do, of course. We want to develop more titles and publish more titles on a global level.