An unofficial Tekken 6 PC port with rollback netcode has sparked a dispute among fighting game players, with several prominent Japanese community members viewing it as piracy and criticizing the project for using Bandai Namco’s game without permission.
Their objections have drawn an angry response from overseas fans, many of whom see the project as a way to play an older fighting game online without relying on outdated console hardware, and the argument between the two sides on X has turned into a fight about each other’s values.
The project recompiles the Xbox 360 version of the game to run natively on Windows instead of emulating it, with modder yuzinator handling the recompilation and Ekspym adding rollback netcode and running the servers. It has an online lobby and matchmaking, but it doesn’t include any game files, so you need your own disc image of the Rev 1 Xbox 360 release from North America or Europe.
Japanese FGC’s sharp reaction
Japanese fighting game veteran Ryo “Dogura” Nozaki criticized the project on X, arguing that releasing an unofficial PC version of Tekken 6 without Bandai Namco’s approval went too far. He was particularly surprised by the lack of opposition from overseas players and suggested that the disagreement reflected fundamental differences in how people viewed copyright and respecting other people’s work.
Another Japanese FGC figure, Higemura, raised concerns about the project taking potential customers away from Bandai Namco’s official games. He acknowledged that he also preferred certain aspects of Tekken 6, including its Bound system and character balance, but argued that fans should create a new fighting game inspired by those mechanics instead of using Bandai Namco’s work without permission.
Higemura also claimed that extracted game data had been uploaded to GitHub, although the project’s publicly available package explicitly excludes those files.
Ichiro Mihara, the vice president of Arika, also joined in, and he knows the netcode side of this better than most, since he worked on the online features of Tekken 7 and Tekken 8. Before helping found Arika in 1995, he was at Capcom, where he worked on games like Super Street Fighter II, and his work at Arika includes Street Fighter EX, Tetris: The Grand Master, and Tetris 99.
He said people openly supporting piracy and rights infringement on accounts that share their personal information must be out of their minds. He also asked how people would react if he built his own netcode for SNK’s Garou: Mark of the Wolves and released it without the rights holders’ permission.
Plenty of Japanese replies went further, saying that a game not being rereleased doesn’t give anyone the right to play it. They also said that owning the Xbox version doesn’t entitle you to play it on PC any more than a ticket for one cinema gets you into another, and they generally accused Western players of having no morals.
Western players argued back
Many English-speaking players disagreed, arguing that Bandai Namco has never provided an official PC version of Tekken 6, let alone one with rollback netcode. The game isn’t entirely unavailable on modern hardware, as its PSP version was rereleased on PS4 and PS5 in 2023, but that edition doesn’t support متعدد اللاعبين.
The unofficial project, meanwhile, offers online play using the more complete Xbox 360 version. Western players mostly see the project as preservation of a 17-year-old game.
Arya Tayebi, the Tekken content creator behind the That Blasted Salami YouTube channel and the Wavedash podcast, pushed back on the idea that the mod takes customers from Bandai Namco. He argued that most Tekken 6 players also own Tekken 8 and that the company should ask why they’d rather play an older game instead of counting them as lost sales.
He added that players aren’t a publisher’s property and don’t owe Tekken 8 their support. He earlier pointed to around 500 people playing Tekken 6 online at once through the mod as a sign of how much interest an official rerelease of the older games with good netcode could get.
Most Tekken 6 players own T8. If they prefer a 17 year old game, ask why instead of calling them lost sales. Bandai Namco hasn’t rereleased older games with rollback, so fans found a way.
Also, nobody owes them Tekken 8 support. Potential customers aren’t a publisher’s property. https://t.co/qDD1f0EvZ6— Arya (@AryaTayebi) October 17, 2026
Most Tekken 6 players own T8. If they prefer a 17 year old game, ask why instead of calling them lost sales. Bandai Namco hasn’t rereleased older games with rollback, so fans found a way.
Also, nobody owes them Tekken 8 support. Potential customers aren’t a publisher’s property. https://t.co/qDD1f0EvZ6
The two sides also come from very different legal backgrounds, since sharing and downloading pirated content can be a criminal offense in Japan, not just a civil matter. After a 2018 revision of Japan’s Unfair Competition Prevention Act, distributing save editors or offering console modding services can mean up to five years in prison, and police have made arrests under that law, including a man who sold modded save files for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2021.
In the U.S., emulators themselves are legal, and an appeals court ruled against Sony in its lawsuit over the Virtual Game Station emulator back in 2000. Preservation groups also often point to a 2023 Video Game History Foundation study that found 87 percent of classic games released in the U.S. are no longer commercially available.
The two sides have mostly ended up trading insults, as Japanese users have called Western players thieves who make excuses for crime, with some linking it to crime in the U.S. In turn, Western users have called Japanese players corporate bootlickers and slaves to companies that don’t care about them, with some going after Japanese culture itself.
Dogura said he doesn’t think the two sides can even have a conversation when their values are this different, and other Japanese players called the situation hopeless. Unsurprisingly, Bandai Namco hasn’t yet commented on the project.
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