Tekken series game director Katushiro Harada explains why fans haven't seen Tekken X Street Fighter yet, and why the game is no longer in active development.

Fighting game enthusiasts looking forward to another crossover between genre juggernauts Tekken and Street Fighter should know that Tekken X Street Fighter is no longer in active development. This was confirmed by Tekken series game director Katsuhiro Harada, who at least offered fans a reason as to why the long in-development Tekken X Street Fighter may never be finished.

"When we develop fighting games, we try to keep the core community in mind as well as the wider audience that wants to play these games. But currently the situation is with fighting games, you have Street Fighter V that just released - a lot of people are playing that fervently - and there's a large crowd out there waiting or Tekken 7."

In other words, timing is what is keeping Tekken X Street Fighter from finishing development. Harada doesn't want the game to compete with the upcoming Tekken 7, and he doesn't want to risk splintering the Street Fighter V community either. However, when one looks back at the history of Street Fighter X Tekken, the Capcom-developed Street Fighter and Tekken crossover, one could see other reasons why development on Bandai Namco's offering has stalled.

As some may recall, Street Fighter X Tekken had on-disc DLC, which proved to be one of the biggest gaming industry talking points of 2012. It started a conversation about the ethical nature of on-disc DLC, with many speaking out against the practice, and others seeing it as a necessary evil given the rising costs it takes to develop video games. Perhaps most notably, gaming analyst Michael Pachter called on-disc DLC "plain greed," whereas Gears of War creator Cliffy B fell in the "necessary evil" camp.

This created a sour reputation for Street Fighter X Tekken among fighting game fans and gamers in general. Combine this controversy with Street Fighter X Tekken's technical issues, and it's no surprise that the game failed to reach Capcom's sales expectations. Even though Street Fighter X Tekken scored well with critics, the fan negativity surrounding the game and its underwhelming sales performance could have made Bandai Namco more cautious when developing Tekken X Street Fighter.

With those issues potentially slowing down the development of Tekken X Street Fighter, the developers missed a good time frame to release the game, and now don't want to risk splitting Tekken and Street Fighter fans between three games at once. It makes good business sense, and at least Tekken X Street Fighter isn't outright cancelled, but it remains to be seen if the game will ever escape development hell.

Tekken X Street Fighter was originally in development for unspecified platforms.

Source: GameSpot