Katsuhiro Harada leaves to launch VS Studio with SNK

Katsuhiro Harada, the man who spent 30 years as the face of the Tekken franchise at Bandai Namco, chose to step down at the end of 2025. His official resignation, submitted on December 8th to coincide with the franchise’s thirtieth anniversary, was initially read by industry observers and players alike as the definitive close of his career in the games industry.

The reality turned out to be different. Five months later came an announcement nobody could have seen coming.

On May 12, 2026, Harada officially unveiled VS Studio, a development subsidiary fully funded by SNK Corporation, a Bandai Namco’s rival in the fighting game space.

The reasoning he gave points to a desire to work again within a leaner structure focused purely on software production, since in recent years at Bandai Namco his role had become largely managerial, centered on overseeing intellectual property rather than making games. VS Studio, then, answers a very concrete need: getting back to hands-on game design, away from the bureaucratic machinery typical of large publicly traded corporations.

Underlining the operational nature of this new chapter, Harada isn’t going it alone. Early reports indicate that Yuichi Yonemori, longtime co-lead and director of central entries in the rival franchise, including Tekken Tag Tournament and Tekken Tag Tournament 2, has joined VS Studio’s roster alongside him. Yonemori has taken on the role of Chief Creative Officer (CCO) within the subsidiary, marking the transfer of a genuinely high-profile technical core into SNK’s orbit.

From a corporate-analysis standpoint, this move is remarkably hard to predict, because it runs directly against the traditional dogmas and taboos that govern Japan’s labor market. It stands as a true outlier in the country’s industrial landscape, breaking with three deeply entrenched sociocultural norms:

• Breaking with Shushinkoyo (lifetime employment): Japan’s industrial system has historically been built on long-term job loyalty. Ending an employment relationship of over thirty years at the peak of one’s career is a sharp departure from the standards of professional stability typical of Japanese management culture.
  
• Rejecting the standard bureaucratic career ladder: In Japanese corporations, seniority typically means moving away from hands-on work toward purely administrative roles. Harada’s choice to walk away from a top managerial position in order to return to hands-on technical direction reflects a priority that’s unusual for the country’s corporate ranks.
  
• Moving to a direct competitor: In local corporate culture, transferring strategic expertise to a rival company, one tied to international financial capital, no less, is sociologically treated as a breach of corporate loyalty, making this one of the most atypical moves the industry has seen.

This isn’t the first time Harada has made a high-risk call. But there’s real history backing confidence in this project: SNK has long lacked a genuinely popular 3D title, while Harada has already reshaped the genre once, with landmark entries like Tekken 3 and Tekken 5.

VS Studio looks like the ideal opportunity to close that gap, pairing a longstanding market hunger with proven, globally successful technical expertise. Only time will tell how this transition plays out, while the international community watches closely, hoping for a strong outcome.