Katsuhiro Harada, former face of Tekken and current CEO of SNK VS Studio, has criticised the practice of judging games solely by their financial performance. Using Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware as an example, Harada highlights how industry figures who started late and worked on relatively obscure titles eventually created breakthrough successes by building on prior experience. Miyazaki, who began game development after age thirty and contributed to titles like Armored Core before Dark Souls, benefited from FromSoftware's thirty-year catalogue of accumulated work, including the King's Field series that directly influenced the Souls formula.

Harada's remarks appear directed at corporate decision-makers who evaluate developer value through purely financial metrics rather than recognising creative growth and technical evolution. He contends that reducing games to cost-versus-revenue calculations ignores the often-invisible groundwork that precedes major successes, and he expresses concern that this mindset has intensified industry layoffs—notably at Bungie—which destroy accumulated expertise that cannot be easily rebuilt.