Although SNK surprised fans with the Team Awakened Orochi announcement for The King of Fighters 15 this morning, there was another reveal that caught the internet by surprise arguably even more — and not in the best way.
A new Twitter account called CryptoKOF suddenly appeared last night claiming to be working on an “officially authorized” NFT project for SNK based on their fighting game franchise, which has since all but disappeared following online backlash from fans.
The original post and attached video didn’t really give away hardly any details about what this CryptoKOF is all about aside from showing an arcade room featuring machines with the title King of Fighters Crypto on the screens.
People quickly took to the comments and other parts of the internet to share their displeasure with the announcement for a handful of reasons including the negative perception of SNK hopping on the NFT bandwagon, especially at a time when the crypto market has been in a rough spot for the past month or so.
Others were wondering if the project was an unofficial scam, but considering the SNK Global account initially retweeted the CryptoKOF post (before removing it), this does appear to be legitimate.
After only a few hours up, however, the CryptoKOF Twitter account (which had only a handful of followers and no other posts) changed its status to protected, so the announcement can no longer be accessed by the public.
You can't go angrily attacking SNK or the people who made KOFXV for this. Shareholders more often than not in companies have more pull in decisions such as this. Just like executives making the fandom U love into a bad show or movie. Like She Hulk being skinny or ugly Sonic.
We have uncovered a website that appears to be created for CryptoKOF, but only the homepage is available and none of the buttons work.
There’s currently little else known about the project except it’s connected to a Shanghai-based NFT marketing firm called Metawave.
It’s also unknown whether the announcement’s removal was in response to the negative fan reception or not though the timing is at least peculiar.
This wasn’t the first time SNK partnered up to try and get into cryptocurrency either.
The makers of King of Fighters Allstar, Netmarble, teased a King of Fighters Arena NFT project back in May, and SNK also joined with OnBuff to sell NFTs based on their popular fighting game and Metal Slug characters.
Pulling off something related to crypto after they are crashing and everything related to it is giving a negative feedback?
I mean props on being ballsy about it but besides that…yeah no man pic.twitter.com/cpa5ZnUM9u
It is important to point out that the actual developers at SNK likely had little to no input on these crypto deals, so it’s not like these NFTs are connected to KOF15 or their other main titles.
These types of partnerships would likely be worked out by the company’s licensing department and potentially other higher-ups at the corporation.
so this is how you guys will go broke for the 3rd time
Considering the CryptoKOF Twitter account is only protected and not deleted, the NFT project will probably pop back up at some point in the not too distant future with more information.
The ultimate worry would be that these types of NFTs find their way into SNK’s main console / PC titles although there’s no indication that’s happening any time soon.
Tweet image via Siliconera.
