Capcom plans to expand internal development team by 1000 over next 10 years

By: Muhammad Qasim Hassan

  |   November 8th, 2012   |  

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Capcom seems to have finally accepted that things are not going too great for it and therefore come up with a new strategy to try improving the quality of its products.

The publisher revealed during a question and answer session with the investors last week that it plans on adding 1000 more jobs at the company within the next 10 years.

This would allow it to create a larger internal development team, which would eventually be given a greater role in making games than the western studios to improve production quality.

“We want to further improve the quality of our games by maintaining an internal game development team,” Capcom informed the investors. “The purpose of increasing our game developer team is to create a larger percentage of our games internally. We believe that there will be no significant change in total development expenditures mainly because we will be shifting outsourced operations to our own workforce.”

The Japan-based company has been outsourcing the development of a number of its games to other countries, working in collaboration with other studios on projects with the intended motivation of increasing its global appeal.

However, the strategy did not seem to be working too well for it, with a number of its titles doing much better in Japan than other countries and getting mixed reaction, which was in contrast to what the company had been aiming for.

By expanding its internal development team to 2,500 from 1,500 over the course of next ten years, the operations will be handled by the internal workforce instead of outsourcing them to foreign studios.

A few of the titles that have been outsourced by Capcom to western studios include Bionic Commando, which was produced by Sweden’s Grin, Dead Rising 2 developed by Blue Castle Games (before it was acquired by Capcom and renamed to Capcom Game Studio Vancouver), Lost Planet 3 made by Spark Unlimited, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City produced by Slant Six Games and the upcoming DMC: Devil May Cry, which has the UK-based Ninja Theory putting in the final touches.

To find Capcom wanting to do something different and making a few changes to its existing strategy does not come off as a huge surprise.

Despite putting in a lot of effort in the development of Resident Evil 6, the game ended up receiving mixed reviews from critics.

One thing to note here is that the game was developed by the internal development team at Capcom, thus the decision to turn away from the western studios cannot entirely be based on the performance of the latest title in the survival horror third-person shooter.

Everyone will have to wait and see if the decision to increase the internal development team and rely more on them instead of other studios pays off for the company.