Just a year after its launch, the 2021 fighting game Guilty Gear Strive had already become the best-selling title in the Arc System Works franchise’s entire history. Four years after its launch, Guilty Gear Strive has gone on to sell over 3 million copies worldwide, with over 3.5 million users worldwide, and the hit game […]
The post Guilty Gear Strive Producer Ken Miyauchi Looks to the Fighting Game’s Future appeared first on Den of Geek.
Just a year after its launch, the 2021 fighting game Guilty Gear Strive had already become the best-selling title in the Arc System Works franchise’s entire history. Four years after its launch, Guilty Gear Strive has gone on to sell over 3 million copies worldwide, with over 3.5 million users worldwide, and the hit game showing no signs of slowing down on its winning momentum. With Guilty Gear being a staple at the Evolution Championship Series, or Evo, for years, Guilty Gear Strive was a main stage competition at Evo 2025, drawing in a large pool of contestants and a popular draw for audiences both in attendance and streaming the event online.
Simply put, Guilty Gear Strive has propelled what was already Arc System Works’ most beloved original franchise to new levels of success and visibility. Helping maintain the game’s ongoing growth and positive reaction from the fighting game community is its post-launch DLC seasons, with Strive wrapping up its fourth season with the franchise’s first-ever guest fighter from a previously established franchise. At Evo 2025, Den of Geek sat down with Guilty Gear Strive producer Ken Miyauchi to talk about all things Guilty Gear, including the surprise inclusion of Lucy Kushinada from the Netflix animated series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners as a crossover character in Strive’s fourth season.
“I really do appreciate that the success wasn’t just from ourselves. It’s really about how the Guilty Gear community is supporting us, trying to keep the community healthy and bring in new players,” Ken Miyauchi-san says. “This is our first time experiencing a game running for four years and going into its fifth year. Usually, what we’ve done is update the game by releasing a new version with a different title, for example, with Guilty Gear Xrd Sign going into Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator and Guilty Gear Xrd REV2. There’s been a lot of studying and things that we’ve learned about how live service for fighting games should be. Learning from those perspectives, we hope to make our updates and live operations better in the coming years.”
The idea to include a guest fighter in Guilty Gear Strive came from a desire to expand the Guilty Gear franchise to even wider audiences, along with repeated strong interest from player polls conducted regularly by Arc System Works. Interestingly, the developers considered bringing in a character from a completely different video game property from Polish studio CD Projekt Red. While Arc System Works are excited to feature a character from CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk 2077 franchise in Strive, it initially approached the studio about the possibility of including a protagonist from The Witcher.
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“Our lead artist, Hidehiko Sakamura, is a big fan of the Witcher series. We originally wanted to reach out to CD Projekt to see if we were able to bring in either Geralt or Ciri from The Witcher 3,” Miyauchi-san reveals. “At that time, CD Projekt was actually working on The Witcher 4. They were telling us that a lot of changes were going on around Ciri. To make sure that they could keep the series’ branding consistent, they didn’t want to put the IP out to different IPs at that moment.”
This early effort to add Ciri or Geralt in Guilty Gear Strive led to continued discussions between Arc System Works and CD Projekt Red, with Miyauchi-san speaking directly with CD Projekt’s Japan country manager Honma Satoru. With Satoru-san also a producer on Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, he recommended the Strive development team also consider crossing over with CD Projekt’s ambitious sci-fi franchise. Looking to introduce a unique character unlike any other previously established fighter in the Guilty Gear franchise, Arc System Works contemplated the inclusion of other Cyberpunk characters in Strive before deciding Lucy Kushinada was the best fit.
“We were thinking about maybe bringing in Johnny Silverhand or V from the game. Of course, in the game itself, the main character is the player so it’s hard to characterize that into a fighting game,” recalls Miyauchi-san. “We ended up picking a character from Edgerunners, looking into the characters, and we ultimately decided to pick Lucy.”
With a fifth season of DLC confirmed at Evo 2025 and Guilty Gear Strive ported to the Nintendo Switch at the beginning of the year, Arc System Works is still hard at work building out the popular title’s ongoing growth and strong place within the fighting game community. While there have been no officially confirmed plans for a sequel or standalone follow-up, Miyauchi-san has been talking about his observations of Strive closely with its director Akira Katano. These conversations have naturally included what the two would do if given the opportunity to work on a potential new Guilty Gear title.
“There were a lot of experimental things that we tried to do, seeing what could work better. We’re doing a lot of post-mortem right now, seeing what worked, what was really received well, what wasn’t received well, going over what was discussed within the community,” Miyauchi-san observes. “If we have another chance to make a new Guilty Gear game, what could be done better is something that we’ve discussed internally a lot.”
Guilty Gear Strive is available now for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Lucy Kushinada, the final character in Season 4 will be released August 21. A fifth season of DLC is currently in development.
The post Guilty Gear Strive Producer Ken Miyauchi Looks to the Fighting Game’s Future appeared first on Den of Geek.
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