Xbox Addict

Sales Fueled Capcom’s Foreign Dev Stance

Capcom president Haruhiro Tsujimoto recently declared in an interview with the Financial Times that the company would no longer look outside of Japan for development of new IPs. Instead, overseas developers would only be trusted with porting games or developing sequels to established franchises.
That decision is largely a result of two flops developed by foreign developers. Dark Void, released this past January, was developed by Airtight Games and sold only 520,000 copies (and the critical response wasn’t especially positive, either). Capcom’s internal projections originally had the game pegged as selling 2 million units.

The other flop was last May’s Bionic Commando, developed by GRIN. Like Dark Void, it too wasn’t a critical darling and managed to sell only 700,000 copies, falling just under half its target of 1.5 million units.

While both of those games were hardly successes, it does seem strange that Capcom is going to completely avoid foreign developers when developing new IP. After all, it’s not as if everything that comes out of Japan is perfect. But as previously noted, Capcom is somewhat heavily invested in foreign developers when it comes to sequels, as evidenced by Dead Rising 2 and the new online Mega Man game, so at least Capcom isn’t avoiding non-Japanese developers altogether.