We don't know who... but it was probably Epic

Samurai Shodown is set to release in the West in only 10 days on June 25 for PlayStation and Xbox users though hopeful PC players will be needing to wait until later in 2019 to finally get their hands on the game — though it seems like they were also almost subject to a platform exclusivity deal too.

The Korean website Game Focus recently interviewed Samurai Shodown's director, Nobuyuki Kuroki, where he discussed aspects of the new title's development and design for the engine and gameplay as well as a digital partnership that ended up falling through.

As noted by King of Fighters / SNK super fan Gatoray, the developers were approached by an unnamed PC platform looking to release SamSho exclusively for their launcher under the condition that they reached a pre-order of 'hundreds of thousands' of copies, but the deal was reportedly rejected by SNK's CEO because he believes that the game can / will sell above 1 million copies without it.

Though they were not named specifically, many believe that Epic were the ones to try and strike a deal for the Epic Games Store given their recent trend of courting a wide variety of developers and publishers to ditch Steam for their platform for a variety of perks with titles like Borderlands 3, Metro Exodus and Shenmue 3.

Kuroki also appears to go on to talk about why they chose to move away from combo-heavy action back to the series' roots of hard hitting strikes as well as working with Unreal Engine 4 compared to their original engine developed for King of Fighters 14.

Currently, Samurai Shodown is not available to pre-order for PC as of yet though we do also know that it will also be available to play on Google Stadia along with Mortal Kombat 11 and Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid.

You can check out the full interview with Kuroki on Game Focus, but you may need to hit up Google Translate to get the gist of what's being said considering it's all in Korean.



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