A complaint we hear over and over again here on EventHubs is that a fighting game's netcode or online match making isn't up to snuff.

Pretty much no title in the community escapes these complaints, from Street Fighter 5: Arcade Edition to Tekken 7, you don't have to look far to see someone saying they're having big issues playing online.

Back in mid-2017, Capcom entered into a deal with Bandai Namco to improve the online aspects of their titles, specifically naming the Street Fighter franchise.

The "deal contributes to a healthier industry while improving user experience," Capcom wrote at the time. Goals of reducing production time and costs, delivering more content to users, and contributing to a healthier game industry were also cited.

Nearly a year later, Bandai Namco announced a network service division, which is a wholly owned subsidiary that will launch on October 1, 2018, about a month and a half from now.

The stated goal of the company is to efficiently and swiftly respond to the need for more stable network connections, starting with Bandai Namco games.

The goal is for this to eventually encompass areas outside of their games and applications, and support all areas of business.

The Bandai Namco Network Services division will attempt to dramatically improve the quality of online operations for Bandai Namco's games, but they state that seeing the results of this might take awhile.

How closely related these two announcements are, from Capcom and Bandai Namco, remains to be seen, but the fact both companies have a history of working together on a similar product is encouraging, in regards to the prospect of it happening again.

It's also clearly stated that Bandai Namco intends to roll this out to their games first, so we might see some nice improvements for Tekken 7 and Dragon Ball FighterZ, but there could be potential bleed over to Smash Ultimate and maybe even Street Fighter 5.

The very encouraging prospect here is that Bandai Namco is taking the online aspects of their games so seriously, they're launching a division specifically dedicated to improving network services.

Given how heavily involved Bandai Namco is with most companies in the fighting game community, we could see their efforts bleed over into many other titles in our scene, and help us take a collective step forward in how functional and strong online gaming is for the FGC going forward.

Keep your fingers crossed.