SNK Devs Talk City of the Wolves, Future Plans

pcmag.com:

SNK is on a roll. The veteran video game developer had many announcements at Evolution Championship Series 2023, including fresh information on Najd (a King of Fighters XV DLC character), its rollback netcode plans for KOF XIII and Samurai Shodown, and a teaser trailer for the highly anticipated Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.

I spoke with Yasuyuki Oda (general manager), Kaito Soranaka (lead game designer), Tetsuro Araragi (CEO's office), and Joshua Weatherford (game designer and translator) about the company's future and, of course, City of the Wolves. The responses are translated from Japanese to English, and lightly edited for clarity.

PCMag: How do you go about picking which characters enter the base roster vs DLC?SNK: There's obviously a lot that we take into account on that front. We do think about fan favorites and the different requests, especially for the DLC. For Najd, there were many requests for her to come back. She was a popular character. However, there are a lot of fans of legacy characters, as well. We want to make sure to pick characters that the newer fans will know, too. So this is one reason that she was picked.

I imagine Du Long falls into that category, too.Yes. 

There's been news that SNK wants to expand into some non-fighting games. Would the company consider resurrecting sports games like Baseball Stars?Yeah, we're obviously thinking a lot about that recently, and I have many plans internally for bringing back different, old IPs. I can't say anything in particular.

The one older IP that everyone's talking about is Fatal Fury, especially after the release of the City of the Wolves teaser. Where does the game fall in the Fatal Fury timeline? Is it like a direct continuation of where Garou ended?