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Capcom stops working with non-Japanese devs – but at least they’re honest about why their market is shrinking

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May 17, 2010 |

Capcom has seen two big flops recently: Dark Void and Bionic Commando.

According to an interview with the Financial Times entitled Capcom shuns foreign game developers, Haruhiro Tsujimoto, Capcom president, said that the company would only “employ overseas developers for sequels or new versions of existing games”.

Capcom believes that original IP developed abroad doesn’t do so well as domestically-developed titles.

But Capcom also talks about why his market is shrinking:

“He pointed to downloadable games, new gaming devices such as Apple’s iPad and the rise of social gaming on platforms such as Facebook as reasons for a gradual decline in Capcom’s traditional packaged game market.”

Compared with publishers and casual games developers who keep “it’s the recession”, even as Modern Warfare 2 blows away all records and companies like Playfish, Zynga and Mind Candy are growing like crazy, this realism is refreshing.

It means that Capcom is on the first step towards evolving its business model for the new world of gaming, unlike many Western publishers.

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  • killingbutterflies

    Strange to quote Bionic Commando as a recent failure for using Western devs and then state that their plan moving forward is to only employ overseas developers for new versions of existing games. Bit of cheek to say something of this for overseas devs when the internally developed Lost Planet 2 turned out the way it did. Also, is the blame completely in the devs corner for the quality and success of these games? We all know how interfering publishers get when it comes to their own IP.

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