I am sad to see this news. Though, it is somewhat inevitable, as KoF was a niche series for a long time now. They never made much attempt to bring in new players like Capcom had. They seemed to rely on the same fan base over and over to buy the titles.
SNK has always been on edge as is. Hell their console had games priced higher than I care to spend ever on a single title. They have been the result of [acid burst] poor decisions for a long time now. I honestly expected them to drop KoF a long time ago, or at least give the series a break. As they went on, each title became more and more thrown together, reusing too many assets. At this point, I even feel like the series is stagnating, and I'm pretty lenient on that sort of thing.
They just come with too little too late, and try to maintain a too high pump out rate. If they had gone with HD sprites way back, or even a proper 3D iteration ala SF4, things may be different. Even when we went to HD, we have fire effects with no alpha blending, and only one super per each character. Did I mention it was a 60$ demo? YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THE SOUND TEST.
Terrible. Honestly, KoF seems to be running itself into the ground. As much as I hate to say it, maybe this would be for the better before the series degrades even more?
Terry Board, you will be missed.