Capcom shakes things up, plans shorter sales cycles

By: Moses Abaortae

  |   September 10th, 2012   |  

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Gamers can expect shorter development cycles and more sequels for series such as Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Dead Rising and Street Fighter as the publisher looks to aim towards an annual release cycle for its top games.

When it comes to Japan there are a number of top developers and publishers that have seen success not just in their own region but across the world as well; the likes of Namco, Konami and Capcom are just three examples.

As it turns out, Capcom seems to want to restructure the way they develop games as well as their revenue stream. At the moment, Capcom releases a sequel to its game every 2 years or so, unless you count the expansion packs and different versions of the same game, such as Dead Rising: Off the Record and all the Street Fighter iterations.

The President and Chief Operational Officer of Capcom, Haruhiro Tsujimoto explained, “We launch sales of popular series held by the Company approximately every 2.5 years. This is because the development of a single major title usually requires 3-4 years.”

One can see that cycle evident with the Resident Evil series, which saw the last Resident Evil game released in 2010 with its successor, Resident Evil 6, set for release later on this year.

Tsujimoto continued, “In the event there are few hits, it will be difficult to create a series title every year and earnings will be adversely impacted.”

That was the problem highlighted by the President of the company, however, it seems that Capcom has come up with a plan to speed up development, shorten sales cycle and boost their revenue.

“For this reason, it is important either to maintain a large number of popular titles or shorten the sales cycle to ensure stable earnings.”

As for the sales cycle, the Tsujimoto highlighted some of Capcom’s biggest names, Street Fighter, Resident Evil and Monster Hunter, among others, before pointing out that the company would “promote shortening of the sales cycle in pursuit of further earnings stabilization and growth.”

At the same time, Capcom would limit the size of each development team to a 100 members, with each team working on a different sequel to a game, much like Activision does with its alternating between Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare series and Treyarch’s Black Ops series, but on a larger scale.

This means that gamers can expect more Resident Evil, Devil May Cry and Street Fighter games in the future, but without the long wait that they are currently used to.

However, one has to ask the question of why Capcom is so bent on emulating Activision and at the same time whether its emphasis on quantity will show as a lack of quality? Only time will tell if Capcom’s plan works but to be honest more Resident Evil doesn’t sound too bad to us.