Dear Capcom,

Alot of us are following Tatsunoko vs Capcom fervently. We get news about the new characters and new developments based on japanese scans and other japanese sources. Recently it was announced that the updated game would get re-released in Japan, including the new characters and re-balanced gameplay. Today we're getting information on Tekkaman Blade joining the roster of the new version of the game. My question is, why isn't this type of news revealed on our own website?

As a matter of fact, if you go to Gamespot today, they already have a whole freakin write-up on Tekkaman Blade, with details about his moves and all kinds of stuff. Why would we let exciting news like this break at another site, and not Unity? Adding to the strangeness is the fact that for example, Gamespot says in their article "Capcom has given us some information on what to expect from the armored hero." So it seems like we already have this information, but we choose to give it away to reviewers and let them take the reputation/credit for having the latest news when we could be breaking it here instead. It would have been a huge success to have all sorts of gaming sites pointing to a Unity article for this announcement, but now they're pointing to Gamespot and sites with famitsu scans instead. These seem like opportunities we pass up.

To make it even more confusing is the fact that a few weeks ago Kramez posted a profile of Saki and Yattaman on the Unity blog, which seemed to be a copy/paste of something IGN had already put together for those 2 characters some weeks earlier. That was rather dissappointing: not only do we not get the news first, we also copy/paste what other sites already put together weeks before. Why is this?

If there is a reason, it'd be nice to know why. I'd love to be able to consider Unity as the place for the latest news, and refresh the front page all day knowing that when Tatsunoko vs Capcom news is made, it will be here before anywhere else. And I'd love to be able to tell everyone I know that Unity is the place for the latest news as well. Sadly, that's just not the case.

Thanks for the time and for all the great games, especially for bringing TvC to the US.

^{EDIT: Replaced most instances of IGN with Gamespot, since that's what I originally meant :)}

EDIT 2: Now all the characters have been leaked and absolutely everyone will know about them in the morning. The newly-redesigned japanese tatsucap site web code points out image placeholders for characters with the following names:

'images/oncharactor_btn_zero.jpg'
'images/oncharactor_btn_frank.jpg'
'images/oncharactor_btn_yatter02.jpg'
'images/oncharactor_btn_joe.jpg'
'images/oncharactor_btn_tekkabla.jpg'

Research suggests these are Zero, Frank West, Yatterman 2, Joe the Condor and Tekkaman Blade.

If this is true, allow me the honor of providing the first opinion on the choices: with the exception of Tekkaman Blade and Zero, they're heart-crushingly dissappointing  

Especially Frank West, Joe Condor and Yatterman 2. We could have done so much better than that.

SoulTaker and Zillion would have been great choices for Tatsunoko. Space Ace as a small character for the Tatsunoko side would have been great. Shurato was an amazingly appropriate choice with much potential. Instead, we get yet another character for the only 2 series that already have more than 1 character in this game: Yattaman and Gatchaman. Why would we do this?

And we got no Devil May Cry or Resident Evil representation... I personally don't feel as strongly about this, but you know the world will never live this down now. We're gonna hear about lack of RE and DMC in this game until TvC2 is out. Why couldn't we just give everyone at least 1 of those? At least to keep the peace, man!

And look, after all these months of anticipation, hooking in the community, waiting for news, and rumors, and Seth's seekrits and everything... and now again we can't have Unity take the claim for this breaking news!  Everyone's pointing to Shoryuken.com instead where stuff is being revealed totally unceremoniously: no pictures, no features, no nothing. Raw back-end code is what these characters got. This announcement could have been a HUGE WIN for the community, but unless the above is all fake, the damage is already done and half of everyone will already know about the characters when TGS comes around. So I ask: did we maybe wait too long on this announcement and just risk a slip-up like this to happen?

Anyway, please provide an answer to the first segment, if possible, and ignore the second if it seems innappropriate. I apologize in advance if so (maybe I'll feel better about the character choices in the morning).

Thanks again for bringing TvC to the US and for this great community.

S-Kill already posted a blog with an interview stating that the characters will be revealed at TGS.  I'm assuming he & Capcom US expected you guys to wait till then to be informed. Leaks happen all the time in pretty much every entertainment industry. There's no way Capcom is going to confirm this leak before TGS, they expected that info to be secret until then. The same thing sort of  applies to Tekkaman Blade. Capcom JP wanted to make that info public. If Capcom US wanted to do the same thing, they would have given that info to IGN, EGM, or whoever. Judging by the S-kill's blog, I'm guessing they just wanted us to wait a bit longer. I don't really see a problem with that.

kotaku.com/5356659/is-frank-west-in-tats...

oh and sorta off topic, but a user on kotaku posted this and i thought it was funny....

tony the tiger vs. m. bison

and then there's the tony the tiger reference from the naruto anime...

You're right, I apologize.  I definitely did notice it with the between character bios between C-U and IGN, and the recent Tekkaman Blade in GameSpot is another.  They did link to it on their Twitter account, but nothing on the main site.

Still, if you keep your eyes open on the forums, it's not so bad.  It's healthy to have a variety of sites in your internet diet.

... I can't believe I just typed that.

Hey Dhylec,

Thanks for the post.  It's a very fair question, seems serious, and well-composed, so I'll do my best to answer it in a robust fashion.

First, we do try and at least have parity with everyone else, so if there's non-rumor news, Unity should have it at the same time as everybody else.  Even if it's an exclusive, we'll let you know where to look.

Why does the info go to other sites in the first place?  Personally I wish some of it didn't.  That said, I do understand why it does in some cases. Here are a few of those reasons:

1) Editorial balance.  As you might guess, *we're* excited about SFIV, but when you see that a bunch of other people who aren't paid by Capcom saying the same thing, it adds credibility. There's good reasons to have info coming from a healthy variety of sources, just like you shouldn't try and get all your real-world news from the same outlet all the time.

2) Tradition.  Unity is sort of a new thing, and Capcom is a pretty traditional company in a lot of ways.  Traditionally a company has info, and they send it out to press outlets to cover.  For instance, we are originally a Japanese company, so a lot of assets go to Famitsu, which is a print magazine, but is still the #1 gaming outlet in Japan. 

3) Total views.  Although we're growing fast, giant sites have more overall traffic than we do, so the idea is that by giving them an exclusive on one of our games, you get more eyeballs on the info--especially by exposing the title to people that aren't already interested in it.

4) Retailers.  Retailers don't track interest on Unity directly.  They use services that track the clickthroughs on a few particular big sites, with the idea that they represent the internet as a whole (this is kind of like the Neilsen ratings for TV--they use a handful of representatives to guesstimate the viewing habits of the public at large).  I dunno how sound that reasoning is in every case, but they have to start somewhere, and that's where they start.  That matters to us because if, according to that evaluation, nobody likes our game, then the retailers don't order as many, which means the game sells worse, which is bad for Capcom. 

That said, a lot of sites have a paradigm more in line with the one you seem to be suggesting.  Companies like Blizzard and Bungie both have their own dedicated portals which have pretty much 100% of their news.  Google does the same kind of thing, but overall, most companies follow the more traditional model with press releases, exclusive story placement, etc.  Capcom is currently a bit of a hybrid, with news on Unity as well as other places.

As for rumors/unreleased info/secret projects/etc.  A lot of people ask me to comment on that stuff.  As a gamer who is hyped about these projects, of course I'd love to, but as someone who also wants to keep a job, I can't do that.  Actually I should say I *could* do that, then the internet would love me for 0.0003 internet seconds, then I would be fired, and they'd hire an even less cool guy that was better at following the internal rules.  I don't actually work in PR, but I do my best to tell people as much as I can without getting fired, and even then I'm still in trouble a lot for leaking this, saying something I shouldn't have, etc.  That doesn't mean some people don't still hate me (and they're free to hate me for whatever reasons--that's what makes the internet go round!), but you do what you can, and work from the inside to make sure what we're doing is as awesome as possible. 

best,

Seth