Happy Summer Flame Day to SNK!
SNK decided that today, the first day of summer and thus Summer Flame Day, was the day to step into a pile of shit of their own creation. They were deservedly flamed for it.
The fun started when a newly-created Twitter account known as CryptoKOF made one of their first tweets, to discuss, to no surprise considering the name, new NFTs featuring The King of Fighters series. Knowing how the NFT “industry” has worked, and I use the term “industry” extremely loosely, they would eventually expand to other franchises after covering the dozens upon dozens of KOF characters. The tweet claimed this was an official effort, but there was initially still hope from SNK’s fanbase that this wasn’t actually the case considering the sheer number of NFTs that have been blatantly obvious scams.
That all came crashing down when SNK’s official Twitter account retweeted the tweet in question. They were all in. We live in a time when people who were once invested in NFTs have since discovered how big of a scam they are. Those who purchased what are essentially JPEGs for high prices while downloading them to the blockchain early on, thus generating enough heat to create future Summer Flame Days for planet Earth, eventually discovered they couldn’t resell them for the prices they expected. SNK figured this was the perfect time for them to jump into the steam bath.
The fanbase, similarly to little surprise, lit SNK’s asses on fire and put the company on blast for taking part in a scam scheme that’s already screwed people out of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. There was no way they didn’t see all of the tweets hurled in their direction targeting the CryptoKOF Twitter account. They responded with quick damage control by unretweeting the tweet, and the crypto account was locked to protect it, likely a result of the sheer number of tweets they were receiving from random accounts. It’s possible the account locking led to the unretweeting, since it’s not possible to retweet content from locked accounts.
This wasn’t all, though. I was tempted to use an image of Kyo Kusanagi here, the once-KOF protagonist who remains its biggest face after nearly 30 years. There was no need to do so when SNK responded with the flames of Orochi by providing a trailer for Team Awakened Orochi in The King of Fighters XV, the third downloadable content team. It will feature the Awakened Orochi variants of Yashiro Nanakase, Shermie, and Chris, this time coming with new threads complete with miniature capes to increase their hot coolness factor — the benefit of the team debuting for the first time with 3D character models instead of sprites.
Now, there’s no definitive proof that SNK quickly provided this as damage control for the hot NFT PR disaster, and they’ll never admit that themselves. But the fact that this trailer only features the character models being shown in a dramatic fashion instead of showing the characters in fighting motion gives the impression that it was quickly whipped up, perhaps prepared as a response to “potential” (I’m using that lightly too — it was all but certain here) backlash to their NFT plans. Either way, it’s all a riot… of the blood, in fact.
Would you believe this still isn’t all? SNK also announced that The King of Fighters ’98 Ultimate Match Final Edition (whew) is now available for PlayStation 4, complete with rollback netplay. This is the final version of The King of Fighters ’98 that includes a total of 64 characters, among them the aforementioned Team Awakened Orochi and the Orochi variants for Iori and Leona. It’s a hot game.
It’s very difficult to believe that both of these announcements were a coincidence; it’s like they knew how to respond for a quick distraction from the NFT fiasco if it went wrong, as it was bound to. It hasn’t entirely worked thanks to an array of snarky comments still hovering around social media, from fans sarcastically wondering if they can sell the artwork of Team Awakened Orochi or the new artwork for the KOF98UMFE (goodness) port.
These kinds of schemes might be what we can expect in the near future from an SNK now almost-entirely owned by Saudi Arabia’s Electronic Gaming Development Company, one so close to the Saudi prince that it might as well be Mohammed bin Salman himself. I hope SNK and the fanbase had a nice Summer Flame Day, but the potential of there being more of them and subsequent damage control efforts to come is uncomfortably high.
About The Author
Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
