Capcom: In Need of an E-Tank?Capcom recently announced that Dragon's Dogma had been pushed back to May 22, with the significant added bonus of being able to try out Resident Evil 6 early on July 3 (noticeably less early on PSN, where PS3 owners will have to wait until September 4). This was a clear demonstration of how much the company expects Resident Evil 6 to be a general boon in the coming fiscal year. It's also a sign that Capcom may be desperate to make sure Dragon's Dogma is a hit, coming from the developers responsible for Devil May Cry 4 and Resident Evil 4.
When Resident Evil 6 was announced, it instantly became one of Capcom's biggest titles of 2012, if not the biggest title. Keep in mind that their titles for 2012 already included Asura's Wrath, Street Fighter X Tekken and Dragon's Dogma, and there had been a much bigger build up for those games. Indications are already that a good portion of Capcom's development resources have been poured into Resident Evil 6 (around 150 developers in Japan and 600 developers worldwide), and with Resident Evil 5 the best selling entry in the series ever, they probably look to the game as a title that needs to be a hit.
Dragon's Dogma is a more interesting case for the venerable Japanese game publisher, indicative of larger forces at work both inside and out of Capcom. Flat out, it has been implied to be one of the most expensive games ever made at Capcom. Dragon's Dogma producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi said to Silconera, "The graphics have been a main source of eating up the budget. This is going beyond anything we had in Devil May Cry 4, which is a pretty linear game with a limited amount of elements that populate it."
The game was originally slated to come out during early 2012, but it's clear Capcom wanted to make sure its investment was going to pay off. Attaching a game to a demo of a popular sequel is a tactic that goes back years, and has been successful in cases like Zone of the Enders carrying the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo and Crackdown containing access to the Halo 3 beta. It's not a fool-proof plan, however – Tobal No. 1 came bundled with a Final Fantasy VII demo and it didn't do well enough to validate its sequel releasing outside of Japan.
Along with giving Dragon's Dogma more polish, there's also some very real logic in the timing of coming out later in the year. Right now, many people are still highly immersed in Dark Souls and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. What's more, many RPG gamers are also likely to be plugging themselves into Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and Mass Effect 3 very soon. This is not to mention the fact that Final Fantasy XIII-2 has released. Maybe Capcom looked at the competition and decided that they would push their new IP into a time of year that's generally less busy.
From a personal perspective, I can understand why Capcom should be concerned from everything I've seen about the game. While it seems as though Dragon's Dogma is trying to reach an audience that prefers grittier, Western-style fantasy over colorful, Japanese takes on Western-style fantasy, I wonder if it will properly appeal to either audience. The plot appears muddled with odd localization idiosyncrasies and the visuals just aren't as impressive technologically as competitors like Skyrim and Witcher 2. The ability to cling to enemies looks clumsy in action and the reliance on NPCs (called “Pawns”) that are totally controlled by the AI is worrisome – real time combat AI is notoriously hard to make reliable, as evidenced by the erratic AI co-op in Resident Evil 5.
The company's consternation about monetary worries was no doubt enhanced by their latest fiscal report. Total sales for the last fiscal year were ¥50.3 billion ($660 million), down nearly 30 percent from the results for the nine-month period ended on December 31, 2010. Net income has also declined over 50 percent to ¥3.24 billion ($42.6 million).
A game like Dragon's Dogma can easily take three or more years and tens of millions of dollars to make and millions more to market it, and if it's a failure then the company has probably lost money to the tune of eight figures. It's part of the reason why new IP are so rare, and while Capcom has been responsible for numerous gameplay innovations over the years, they've never been shy about running sequel after sequel out the door on their big franchises.
No franchise fits this description better than Mega Man; with spin-offs and spin-offs of spin-offs, there have been numerous different incarnations of the Blue Bomber. People have complained that the brand has been exploited too much since the '80s, but Mega Man has been a reliable seller for the company. That is, until the past couple years where Mega Man releases have come to a halt following the departure of co-creator Keiji Inafune from Capcom. Along with leaving a mega-buster sized hole in the company's lineup, it also is symptomatic of a brain drain problem at the company.
After closing its Clover development studio, Capcom saw many of the developers from that team form the core of Platinum Games. People like Atsushi Inaba and Hideki Kamiya were vital in the creation of franchises like Okami, Vietwiful Joe and Devil May Cry and their talent and creativity are very hard to replace. Meanwhile, Shinji Mikami helped create the Resident Evil franchise and later popularly remake the series' formula in Resident Evil 4; he's now gone over to his own studio owned by ZeniMax.
As for former Capcom producer Inafune's impact, he wasn't just one of the key people behind Mega Man in his several different incarnations, but he was also instrumental in getting the company to look beyond the borders of Japan for development work and to try to more explicitly appeal to Western audiences - but that hasn't always worked out for Capcom either.
Indeed, Inafune is famously outspoken for how behind the times Japanese developers are compared to those in the West. While his effort to expand Capcom's business is laudable, he also spearheaded projects that were spectacular failures for the company. Bionic Commando was a thorough disappointment given its heritage and Dark Void outright flopped. While Lost Planet: Extreme Condition did reasonably well as an early Xbox 360 title, the sequel was panned and a notable failure. Right now the jury is still out on DmC, though it'll be interesting to see if the game can vault its infamous redesign of Dante. The only real success was Dead Rising, which produced a successful sequel that even had a spin off of its own in Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. That non-canon version of Dead Rising 2, however, brings up the problem with sequels I mentioned before – it's another potential issue for Capcom going forward.
Laudably, the company has revived its Street Fighter brand from near dead to thriving. Unfortunately, Capcom seems to be doing things that helped drive the franchise (and fighting games) into the ground in the first place. Street Fighter IV saw three total retail releases, and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 didn't even have a year between its major disc-based releases. Now this year, Street Fighter X Tekken is releasing and a totally different title Tekken X Street Fighter is planned – times have changed since the '90s when fighting games literally flooded the market, but it it doesn't mean that it won't burn itself out again.
And I would be remiss in talking about sequels without mentioning Resident Evil. Yes, Resident Evil 6 is coming out this year, which is a sign of how long in the tooth the franchise is – but it's not really the sixth Resident Evil title. There have been a multitude of various spin-offs and even a couple of games (Resident Evil Zero and Code Veronica) which are part of the game's main canon but aren't numbered in a regular fashion. Resident Evil 6 isn't the only Resident Evil game this year either, with the multiplayer focused Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City coming out, which represents another roll of a the dice with a Western developer. Monster Hunter, it must be said, has been one of the biggest franchises over the past few years in Japan, but Capcom hasn't found the right formula to translate the series' success in the West. As Inafune noted of his former company, “Basically, there are no internally-developed titles outside of Monster Hunter that can be qualified as hits. There are no internally-developed hits besides Monster Hunter and Biohazard.”
While the company's AAA titles twist in the wind, Capcom's mobile division continues to rise. Smurfs’ Village makes money hand over fist while Capcom’s Beeline brand has seen over 46 million downloads. Other branded fare that has done well includes Snoopy’s Street Fair and the new Resident Evil: Outbreak Survive which has gotten off to a good start on GREE. This all has led to an impressive 68 percent net increase in sales to ¥4 billion ($52.6 million), with a whooping 189 percent rise in operating income to ¥1.37 billion ($17.9 million). It's a fraction of the company's business right now, but at the current rate of growth it will be a significant chunk of their revenue soon – it's already over a third of the company's profit.
Given the risks of AAA development, between expense, time and unpredictability, Capcom is now at a crossroads like much of the rest of the industry. The company has to face the idea of risking money in ventures they're likely to take a bath in, or put in less money for something that will more immediately produce profit. For any publicly traded company, they're going to have to take a good long look at themselves and decide why they're doing more of the former instead of the latter.
