So, the burning question of course is whether we will see season 3 or not. The answer is still “can’t say” which is quite infuriating but from a marketing point of view I can see what they’re doing: it’s to keep us talking and to keep measuring the interest.

On the other hand, at some point, if we arrive at the end of 2024 without any news, there are just going to be a lot of annoyed fans. However, the fans have a lot more distractions to keep them busy, if they like playing anything other than kof.

That’s not my case, I’m a bit special as as I still want to learn a ton of characters in KOFXV and don’t want to play any other fighting game. SNK has other plans for you, if you thought there was nothing to do till the launch of COTW. Samurai Shodown has been re-launched with rollback and (up to) 85% discount on Steam. Perhaps they want us to play that in the meantime… Indeed, it’s a great game but… it’s not KOF.

The SNK World championships 2025 have been announced, albeit with late announcements (wasn’t this improved last year?) for qualifying spots, so while it’s good news, it’s proving tricky to plan. Combo breaker just happened, and Score couldn’t attend due to the 1 week notice. UFA in September should be a qualifier but there’s no announcement of the games as yet and SNK is literally burning money at this point to keep KOF in the public eye while Tekken and SF6 release more and more characters. So while we may think SNK isn’t supporting us with new content, they are certainly investing in giving us more live tournament action.

Perhaps the last question is where do Samsho & Cotw fit into this, or will they join in 2026? Will I even still be able to block at that time? Another challenge for all the game companies is to keep their fans playing, and we’re getting older! What are the younger fans playing? Something with guns or footballs, I imagine…

The trip to Japan was great, bought lots of trinkets to add to the museum while some stuff will be given away in lotteries and we had a great looking t-shirt for our Kof13 tournament, illustrated by fan artist Rei, now I’m thinking about doing a new one for UFA, but I need to do a couple of quality checks. You can see some of the goodies here:

Make sure to follow on social media, there will be giveaways on each one, plus, I’ll be letting go of some merch at UFA!