Tekken series creator Katsuhiro Harada has just dropped a bombshell about the upcoming Tekken 8, confirming that it will feature crossplay.

In a series of Q&A tweets, Harada revealed that he had been pushing for crossplay in Tekken since even the last console generation.

“Crossplay? Of course I will”, he says. “When the previous generation consoles were released, I had already proposed crossplay between the two platformers (sic). However, at that time, they were at odds with each other over their mutual interests (and P2P security issue) & repeatedly refused”.

Given the off-the-cuff nature of the answer, there’s still quite a few details missing- Harada has not confirmed that Tekken 8 would launch with crossplay, or if it would be coming in a future update.

It should be noted that this information is directly from Harada himself- the official Tekken social media pages have not made any such announcement prior to or after Harada’s comments.

Moving Fighting Games Forward

Crossplay is seen as one of the big must-have features for modern fighting games- overcoming the old hurdle of communities needing to decide which platform would be the “main” one for any given title.

Of the major fighting game releases, the upcoming Street Fighter 6 already features crossplay- with players of the previous beta being able to match up regardless of platform.

Similarly, Guilty Gear Strive also retrofitted the feature into the title, ahead of its Xbox and GamePass release.

The second must-have feature fans had been clamoring for is netcode- recent years have seen a near-universal adoption of rollback netcode, specifically the GGPO solution used by titles like Skullgirls.

While fans have been known to complain about Tekken 7’s netcode, Harada had previously, on his Bar Harada program, confirmed that the title did use some variation of rollback netcode.

Tekken 8 will release on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 as well as PC via Steam, with no currently confirmed release date.