I don’t think anybody reading these hallowed pages really judges games by their sales figures, but it’s nice to hear that perspective affirmed by no less a Legendary Fightguy than Katsuhiro Harada, the former face of Tekken. Out of the blue, Harada has posted some very nice words about Dark Souls kingpin and FromSoftware president Hidetaki Miyazaki, noting that Miyazaki came late to game development and worked on a bunch of less praised or successful games, before landing it big with Souls.

Harada (who is currently CEO of SNK VS Studio) makes the obvious but eminently repeatable argument that these older, less celebrated projects paved the way for the Souls series. He accuses people who think disparagingly of them of being unable to “appreciate the journey or the growth of the developers themselves”. It’s not clear who these statements are aimed at, exactly, but Harada does add that he’s “NOT talking about the fan community”. The whole thing sounds like a rebuke to publisher moneymen who only think as far as the next earnings call.

Writing on Xitter in response to a fan question, Harada describes Miyazaki’s career path as “exceptionally unusual” – after all, he started out in the business after turning 30, and didn’t work at one of the “major development studios that held a significant technological advantage during the early polygon era”.

For context, Miyazaki contributed to three, OK-ish Armored Core games before bowling over critics with Demon’s Souls in 2009. FromSoftware as a whole date back to 1994. The studio had worked on dozens of games, including the sadly forgotten Tenchu and the horror game Echo Night, before Miyazaki joined their ranks as a designer. In particular, From’s long-running and not wildly regarded King’s Field action-RPG series is an obvious precursor to the Souls universe, offering up similarly mazey world design and a pervasive air of gloom.

Harada says that he “was personally involved with the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring”, as publisher Bandai Namco’s general manager, though he never laid a finger on development itself. “From that perspective, I can say that Dark Souls didn’t suddenly become a massive success overnight,” he asserts. “It was the result of everything Miyazaki and his team had built up through their previous titles.

“Today, he receives offers from all over the world,” Harada continues, “but when I think back to the days when he and his team were struggling the most, many of those offers seem like they’re coming from people who only know who they are today. Some of them almost feel like complete reversals in attitude. Well, that’s just my personal perspective.

“Personally, I had grown tired of people who would simply compare games by saying things like, ‘That title cost X billion yen to make and sold Y million copies,’ and then use nothing but those numbers to judge them against other games,” Harada complains. “There were so many people who couldn’t appreciate the journey or the growth of the developers themselves. Anyone can look at the current numbers—they’re available to everyone. Whenever I heard those kinds of opinions, I always thought, ‘That’s exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s never actually developed games.'”

Again, all these sentiments are quite obvious, but it’s nice to hear them at a time when the industry is undergoing another brain drain of seasoned developers. Sony have just jettisoned over half the Destiny 2 team, for example, and those are some of the finest FPS designers you’ll find. Doubtless, gutting a studio like Bungie make sense when viewed through the icy prisms of revenue and cost projections, but that’s literal centuries of accumulated expertise you aren’t getting back.