Poor Yoshinori Ono. The Capcom producer and the man behind games like Street Fighter IV and the upcoming Street Fighter x Tekken can’t seem to keep a secret. Nearly all of the information for his projects seems to be leaked ahead of time, be it roster details, downloadable content, and more.
When asked how he feels about the early, unauthorized reveals, he’s surprisingly torn.
“Yeah, it’s an interesting feeling because it’s kind of half and half for me,” he explains through a translator. “The first half, obviously, [is that] it’s not cool to disrespect our very carefully laid plans. It could disrupt sales, it affects the likelihood of sequels coming out, it has a big chain reaction effect that the leaker initially hadn’t necessarily concerned himself with.”
But at the same time, as a fan of games himself, he understand why people are curious.
“Certainly I’d be interested in knowing who’s dating whatever supermodel I’m interested in at the moment,” he says, making the parallell to celebrity gossip. “It’s natural to want to know that stuff.”
“I’m probably going to get trouble once this goes to print,” he says with a smile before adding, “but I’ll say it anyway…”
“So in addition to half of the feelings, which is disappointment, the other half is it kind of makes me happy,” he continues. “It just shows people are interested, and that they’re so excited about a game that they’ll go to great lengths and jump through big hoops to get information out there. It just shows how much they’re looking forward to these titles. Honestly, it does make me half happy.”
“They could time these things better if they didn’t really want to totally destroy me,” he says, laughing.
Key takeaway, leakers: it’s great that you want to get the information out there, but stop — you may be jeopardizing our chances at seeing another Darkstalkers!
