21

Damn this looks awesome. :]

22

Is Ibuki going to be a secondary character, like Chun-li was?

23

I didn’t think Chun-Li was a secondary character in her own mini… but I can assure you that Ibuki is at the core of this story and the main character through and through.

24

weird to say it, i like that the females are getting a spot-light due the games are puttin the males in the spot-light. wat’s really gonna be the pick of the litter is gonna be when they go to the super char…lol* (hope this happens, even tho its a possibility)… i do on the other hand await your more releases… :smiley:

25

So is the SF III comics still coming 2010?

26

I still hope to see a lot of Makoto :smiley:

27

I usually leave the posting to Matt when it comes to official UDON correspondence on SRK.

You’re welcome. I’m really glad you enjoyed it.

We’re all really excited about the Ibuki series and looking forward to the fan response once its released.

It’s definitely a possibility. :slight_smile:

Elena will be a part of the story, I can tell you that.

Hopefully we’ll be able to give you more info about those related comics soon.

28

Long, long before the Final Fight license was given to Udon, Erik Ko said in this very forum ages ago, that Udon did not have the license for Final Fight, so making a comic based off it would be impossible. And the only time that would ever happen, is if they were able to secure said license from Capcom. I understand Udon has to be choosy with what licenses they put out there, after such, um, “brief” runs with Darkstalkers and Rival Schools…

But now Capcom is finally re-releasing Final Fight for the PSN and XBLA, with online play, filters to make it shine a bit brighter in HD, and remixed music, this April…and, well?

Lost opportunity. You could have even had a bit of cross promotion; this new downloadable release has a “vault” where the player can unlock various goodies, including artwork, music, etc. How cool would it have been if the player could unlock a digital image of the Final Fight #1 cover? “Hey, I like Final Fight, I didn’t know there was a comic! Maybe I should purchase this!” Again, that ship has sailed. Oh well.

But instead, another Legends series focusing on a girl character. It’s been forever since we seen those. Obviously, since you keep putting them out, they must be successful for you guys, so I’m thankful for that, but again…it wouldn’t hurt to branch out for a simple 3-ish mini-series, featuring two of the characters that will be appearing in Super Street Fighter IV this spring.

29

Okay, I don’t want to sideline this thread too harshly but I do want to clear up a misconception. A lot of fans think this kind of stuff is easy to get rolling and that a big media push will suddenly result in massive comic sales.

We love our fans and we’re proud to create a product that expands upon Capcom’s popular properties. There are millions of Street Fighter players around the world and the thousands who have read and enjoyed our comics mean a great deal to us. Even still, most of those fans are just fans of the video games and won’t ever cross over to other related products, period.

Example:
World of Warcraft has over 12 million players who pay their subscription fees every month. You’d assume that’s an unbelievably huge built-in market primed and ready for related products, right? The World of Warcraft comic book, which is in the Blizzard store and occasionally gets coverage right on the Load screen when you start up the game, sells less than 12,000 copies a month. That’s less than 1/10th of 1 percent of their audience, not even counting fans of Warcraft lore who may not be playing WoW.

How many people are going to buy the Final Fight download title?
How many of those people are going to unlock all these art assets?
How many of that percentage are going to then get off the couch and buy the comic?

From where you’re sitting it seems simple, but the actual numbers involved are more complex.

We’re far better served to create a Street Fighter-centric mini-series that taps into the millions of fans who love those characters, something that can ride alongside an upcoming huge SF game release, using the established fan base we’ve built for our comics and art books and rolling that into an extended and related product, hoping it can increase the visibility and sales.

That’s our thought process, not just shooting from the hip because of assumptions about cross promotion and marketing.

We’re a small publisher in a large and sometimes brutal business. We’ve been publishing these books since 2003 because we throughly enjoy it and also because they’re profitable. That’s the reality of the business. Wanting to do these projects and making actual financial projections on them are two very different things. If it were as simple as just doing whatever we felt like, we’d do the craziest fan-centric and obscure material to please ourselves and the 30 most rabid fans we see on forums and at conventions.

Have we talked about Final Fight? Absolutely. We signed the license as part of other deals we had going on with the hope of doing something with it.

Will we do a Final Fight mini-series? It’s quite possible, but at this moment we don’t want to over commit on titles.

We promised fans we’d give Darkstalkers comics another try and fans of the Night Warriors have been more than patient, so that’s what we’re taking a bit of a risk on right now.

I appreciate that you’d like to see more material from us, I really do. We’re doing our best to balance the releases and expand where possible.

30

i understand this fully, even tho me and my friend talked to someone in the industry of anime and manga, what he told us is exactly what zubby’s saying. a market is deeper than the drug game. LOL* but in order for ppl to grasp attention, you have to market it while keeping the fans happy. if ppl don’t even notice the franchise but the main event like the game, you don’t sell, and therefore you don’t get any profit. therefore you waste money for nothing, and therefore have to regroup and start from one. it hurts the industry as a whole yet only trying to appel to just a few. i believe its in everyone’s best interest if ppl could just wait. i mean look at street fighter 4!!! it took em like forever to make another one!!! oh and in case your wondering i went to mechacon in laf and talked this person in the industry (this wasn’t zubby or someone from udon)…

ok now contin. wit the thread, i would like a question and answer from udon: is there a any sf comic collections like the ryu and akuma available anywhere besides amazon, or ebay? man i’m like dying to get that ever since i read them all the way up to the gen/chun/??? (sry i fogot) fight…man i wanna know what the hell happened!!! lol*

31

Well thanks for that comprehensive answer Zub, I really do appreciate you guys explaining things. It’s just, I get kinda frustrated that alot of Capcom properties (ones even lesser known than Final Fight) have had more substantial presence in other forms of media, but Final Fight is still left out in the cold, despite it being Capcom’s 9th highest selling franchise of all time.

I basically blame this state of affairs on Final Fight Streetwise.

Oh, any date of when the Phoenix Wright artbook will finally release? I had hope to get it for my GF on Xmas…

32

i don’t thing final fight streetwise was the a big upset for the franchise. even tho that game was horrible in my opinion, i thought that the game itself wasn’t even a final fight, but since capcom owned the name, they just strapped it to the title. other than that, i believe that final fight with haggar, guy, and cody will come to the light sooner than you think switch. to tell you the truth, i prob won’t be surprised if they put it out after ssf4, due to the fact that cody and guy recieved some spot light in game, but i think that udon did cover a lil bit of final fight in turbo. i think that poison was fighting cody in it, so i’m guessing that sf universe has something to do with the final fight series as well.

and no, i don’t work for udon (even tho i wish i could), just a person in college trying to become a game designer…lol*

33

I hope we’ll see the origin of Vega (Claw) and his conection to Geki, the founder of the Geki Ninja Clan, in this comic book! And I hope that Retsu is the father of Makoto and we’ll see their origin story, too.

SF1 characters need more screen time in the comics! Make tasty Udon!

34

Yeah, no. Final Fight Streetwise was Final Fight from the very beginning.

It started out as an awesome cell-shaded beat em’ up with a fixed camera, called Final Fight Seven Sons, and the game was apparently super fun to play. But when higher ups from Capcom USA saw the game, they wanted them to scrap the entire thing, (save for some elements of the battle system) and GTA-fied it. Put tons of swearing, and make a huge story mode, and keep it single player focused, etc. Essentially, make it into GTA.

And that is where Streetwise was born.

35

From my understanding it was Keiji Inafune, one of the head honchos at Capcom and best known for his work on the Mega Man franchise who wanted to as you say ‘GTA it.’ The original USA Team, Studio 8 wanted to make a game like you say and even involve Akiman for character designs. Inafune felt Japan themselves could’ve made a game like that and they wanted something different.

Suffice it to say, FF Streetwise was a really early attempt at Capcom trying to make a Western styled game (the West spends way more money on games than Japan does nowadays) like Lost Planet or Dead Rising. So they’ve had more success with that kind of thing later on, but also games that didn’t do so well like Bionic Commando 3D.

Not that you’re wrong or anything but it probably was a little bit of both.

36

An interesting read on the story process for the Ibuki series.