The Reaper casts it's gaze at Capcom

[Kyanbu The Legend]

http://gaminrealm.com/2013/09/10/capcom-152-mil-bank/



According to GameIndustry, Capcom has a total of $152 million dollars in the bank.

To those who may not be so knowledgeable when it comes to the financials of these gaming companies, that is not a lot of money by any means. That’s actually a dangerously minuscule amount. To put things into perspective, Nintendo made roughly more than this in their 3 months alone. This leads to Capcom making huge changes for this upcoming gen, including an even bigger focus on DLC than before.

“I regret to say that, up to now, we had few plans for the full-scale implementation of DLC.” From here on out, we need to focus on the long-term provision of content starting at the earliest stages of development. Furthermore, in terms of user response, if the additional related content we are providing continually to users online is deemed uninteresting from the start, there will be no ongoing business to pursue. This means that, more than ever before, the creation of underlying content is the key to success.” - COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto

If we all thought that Capcom’s sneaky on-disc DLC practices were bad, well, it’s only going to get worse for now on. This could also mean that hardly and “exclusive” Capcom games will stay exclusive. Don’t be surprised if Deep Down comes to the Xbox One, seeing how Capcom is really in need of the cash right about now.

Even worse, of course, this is a next-generation transition. Going into the next gen with higher-budgeted projects and only $152 in your back pocket is very dangerous.

But in all honesty – and I’m sorry to say this – but I can’t feel sorry for Capcom. This is what happens when you nickel-and-dime gamers and sellout your most beloved franchises in the attempt of appealing to the masses. Capcom has continually betrayed their fans and have even buried their own beloved mascot, Megaman. They may finally get what’s coming to them.

Could this mark the beginning of the end for Capcom?






So yeah Capcom is dying now.

[Ryong]

Monster Hunter 4 sold 1.7 million copies in two days.

They'll be fine.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Even monster hunter won't save them forever if they continue to piss off their customers.

[Flarecobra]

Dead Rising 3 is also coming out soon as well, which is being made by Capcom. Also, I can't find any other stories about Capcom being in financial trouble.

[Azisien]

They're a garbage company, I hope they do fail.

[Revising Ocelot]

If that value is true, then Capcom possess a good $100m less than the entire production/marketing budget of some new car game nobody cares about.

I really hope Mighty No. 9 reaches the PS4/Xbone stretch goal.

[Doc ock rokc]

Dead Rising 3 is also coming out soon as well, which is being made by Capcom. Also, I can't find any other stories about Capcom being in financial trouble.

Dead Rising 3 has broken the base of Dead rising fans. Most of them enjoyed the extremely implausible weapons and the silly abilities rather then the new "Grtty and SRS" Look they got for it now.

It seems to me that the simplest thing they could do is buy some Fanmade Megaman games that are exceptionally well done. Polish them up a little and release them for a cheap price, say 6 or 7 bucks. BOOM they get a shit ton of money. They make a fan developer happy. They create a reason for people to build games for them almost for free to get their name in lights. They FINALLY do something with the blue bomber and if they want they can do it several times with multiple indy developers creating a indy initiative group that their company can just churn money off of.

Or you know let Platinum off their leash to do something freaking crazy again like anarchy reigns.

[Loyal]

It seems to me that the simplest thing they could do is buy some Fanmade Megaman games that are exceptionally well done. Polish them up a little and release them for a cheap price, say 6 or 7 bucks. BOOM they get a shit ton of money. They make a fan developer happy. They create a reason for people to build games for them almost for free to get their name in lights. They FINALLY do something with the blue bomber and if they want they can do it several times with multiple indy developers creating a indy initiative group that their company can just churn money off of.


MegaMan Unlimited got released not too long ago (bomb soundtrack (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqmpich8Knc&list=PLbHJBmNT-przK0L7YmuzLhxogZ0moOiGC)), and this guy's channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/qzecwx/) is basically filled with exhibitions of fanmade MM games. It's baffling hwo Capcom has somehow managed to ignore every single one thus far aside from the iffy Street Fighter one.

[Bells]

They are going to take a good, deep look into Killer Instinct...

then... they are going to release Rival Schools 3.

But it only has 3 teams of 3 characters.

Every other team is DLC, $10 per team of 3 characters. They will release 1 team a month for a full year.

Plus $5 for costume packs for each team.

My seething rage will be burning white, brighter than the sun over the caslte of a thousand unreasonably enraged gods by then.

And the bastards will be rich.

[Bard The 5th LW]

Isn't Dead Rising 3 the one where they decided that the series needs to stop being fun?

[greed]

Yeah they're sounding like Rockstar did pre GTAIV. And GTAIV sucked. But yeah the only thing of Capcom's I still enjoy is MonHun and well, if they die that will be saved cause well most Japanese companies would probably go to knife fights to decide who gets that IP and team if Capcom dissolves.

[MSperoni]

Isn't Dead Rising 3 the one where they decided that the series needs to stop being fun?

You're thinking of Resident Evil 4.

[Ryong]

Apparently Nintendo had a 3-year exclusivity contract with Capcom that just ended, so Monster Hunter 4G for the Vita is probably happening.

[Bells]

You're thinking of Resident Evil 4.

But in THAT case it was Ok because RE4 was a genuine good game.

And you fight Midget Napoleon and fleer from giant stone robot statues, i mean c'mon!

Then they decided the series needed to be stupid and we got RE5. But that wasn't stupid enough so we got Revelations. Then they tried to turn the nob a little bit further into stupid and it broke off and that's how we got RE6.

[POS Industries]

I love how Capcom's apparent solution is to do the stuff that turned off their consumer base even harder.

God forbid they just sit down and try making good games again.

[Bells]

No no no... you see, its genius. They plan on pissing people so much, so far into the spectrum that it will flip over to love and respect.

[Revising Ocelot]

But RE4 had its share of head-exploding suplexes, that it does.

[MSperoni]

RE4 is where they decided the series needed to stop being any good, but they still put in an effort, so RE4 was still well made. And it was still enough like a survival horror to not be wholly shitty. At least in RE4 you couldn't farm ammo/health *stares at Resident Evil 5*.

RE was better when the games were slower paced and felt more like low-budget horror films, not action blockbusters. Leon suplexing zombies is funny, but that's more Dead Rising than Resident Evil. The old games had issues too though, with their awkward controls and whatnot, but it would've been nice if Capcom had kept developing RE as Survival Horror rather than turning it into a super easy action game.

(Or alternatively called Resident Evil 4 a different name and established it as a new franchise)


I have this theory that aside from Nintendo (who has the advantage of having their own console), Japanese game companies aren't as big of a fish in the pond like they used to be. They're still capable of producing great games (like Dark Souls), but there's a lot more competition now. Back in the early console days, Western developers really hadn't found their footing yet, so games by Capcom, Square/Squeenix,etc were all the rage. Now they're not, and instead of taking this for what it is, Capcom acts all desperate and decides to bend over backwards to "sell games to Western audiences" and turns Resident Evil into...what it has become. It's not going to work. I dunno what would work for them, but trying to be something they're not doesn't seem like a great idea to me.

And then Square freaks out because FF13 didn't "meet expectations" even though it probably did pretty well. They're going to blame it all on having a woman protagonist or American audiences "not getting it" rather than the fact no one cares as much about Final Fantasy like they used to.

[Bells]

I was talking with a couple of people on Twitter (yeah...) about just that.

We were talking about Atlus and how in 2013 they only thing they made was Dragon's Crowd and how 2012 was entirely about Persona Arena and 4 Golden. That they produce content for their very specific fanbase and although that makes them good on what they do, they are not really game changers... so having Sega Buy them is something interesting to see in the "this could suck sooooooo much or maybe not" format.

Then that jumped into how Squeenix knows how to craft a world and a story (more often than not) and characters (sometimes) but have been piss poor on grasping gameplay ever since they decided that all of their non-final fantasy games were Betas to new Final Fantasy systems.

That goes way back to Parasite Eve, Vagrant Story, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy 11 and then Dissidia... and a ton of other games they made, and when you put them in a line is almost like watching the Gestation period of Final Fantasy 12 and its Emo little brother FF 13.

Just as much as "Lightining Returns" is the "Beta Phase" of Versus 13, which will launch the next wave of Gameplay changes alongside the next Kingdom Hearts.


...but Going back to Capcom for a second,

....no, seriously.... where is my Rival Schools 3?

[POS Industries]

And then Square freaks out because FF13 didn't "meet expectations" even though it probably did pretty well. They're going to blame it all on having a woman protagonist or American audiences "not getting it" rather than the fact no one cares as much about Final Fantasy like they used to.
It's at least worth noting that S-E responded to FF13's lower then expected sales by turning it into a trilogy and making its female protagonist into the main character of the sequel to the fanwank fighting game, so it's nice to know that they very much didn't go that route (of course, it's not like it's the first game in the franchise with a female protagonist).

The argument that it didn't sell as well because people aren't as interested in FF anymore might not hold as much weight when you consider that the relaunch of their previously abysmal MMO castly exceeded their sales expectations to the point where they didn't even have server capacity for everyone who wanted to play. If anything, the reason why FF13 didn't do as well as they'd hoped was because it just wasn't that great a game and Squeenix's sales expectations for all their games at the time were simply unrealistic.

If FF14 is any indication, S-E might finally be getting around to moving away from the same sort of business practices that has destroyed Capcom, and for their sake I hope they do.

[Bard The 5th LW]

I'd say RE4 was a great game. Played that to hell and back. It just might not have been made in the spirit of a Resident Evil title though. (I WILL uphold however that the Regenerators were more scary than anything I saw in 2 or 3).

Dead Rising 3 is the one where they expect you to kill a bunch of zombies by clicking a button on your phone instead of ACTUALLY KILLING THEM.

[Ryong]

We were talking about Atlus and how in 2013 they only thing they made was Dragon's Crowd and how 2012 was entirely about Persona Arena and 4 Golden.

Atlus didn't make Dragon's Crown at all.

2012 they had Etrian Odyssey 4, Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers, Persona 2 PSP port and Persona 4 The Golden.

2013 they had Shin Megami Tensei 4 and the localization for half of the 2012 games.

Persona 4 Arena is developed by an entirely different company ( Arc System Works ) and published by Atlus. Dragon's Crown is also developed by an entirely different company ( Vanillaware ) and published by Atlus.

On the subject of Capcom:

They're releasing the PC MMO ( Frontier ) for the PS3 and Vita now, because their 3 year exclusivity contract of monster hunter games with Nintendo just finished.

They'll get a lot of money and then proceed to waste it all again, I assure you.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

MegaMan Unlimited got released not too long ago (bomb soundtrack (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqmpich8Knc&list=PLbHJBmNT-przK0L7YmuzLhxogZ0moOiGC)), and this guy's channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/qzecwx/) is basically filled with exhibitions of fanmade MM games. It's baffling hwo Capcom has somehow managed to ignore every single one thus far aside from the iffy Street Fighter one.

Over at Capcom unity. A rep from the indi group that made Megaman Battle Network Chrono X. Asked Capcom if they could publish their fan made MMBN game. Capcom said no, because doing so would put their ownership over the IP at risk. MMxSF being the exception apparently.

[greed]

Apparently Atlus on it's own is fairly profitable so my hope is Sega just has little effect beyond providing a good European/Australian publishing arm (fat chance). Square I'm less worried about because well they seem to be getting better. Also RE4 was the only good Resident Evil.

[MSperoni]

RE1 Remake was the best RE game.

[Bard The 5th LW]

I preferred the N64 port of RE2 because the one of the optional control-sets made it a lot more manageable to move around.

[MuMu]

Tank controls were the cornerstone of classic RE, it would've been a whole different game if you could actually go where you wanted to without rotating your character like a statue.

[Ryong]

Terrible controls: the cornerstone to terror games that rely on jumpscares.

See: classic RE, Dead Space 1, Clock Tower, Fatal Frame and others.

[Bells]

why'u stopped on Dead Space 1?

I think the development title for that entire franchise is "Jump scare: The Ripoff"

[BitVyper]

Don't know where this 152 million figure, vaguely referred to as "in the bank" is coming from. I'm looking at Capcom's most recent annual financial report (March 31st), and it says they have ~335 million cash on hand and in banks with an operating budget of ~102 million. Have they spent their entire operating budget 1.8 times since then?

http://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/data/pdf/annual/2013/annual_2013_01.pdf - see for yourself. Page 68 for the 335 mil figure, and 65 for the 102 mil (it's in Yen though; I just did a conversion).

Anyway, according to this report, this is far from being the worst shape they've been in.

Edit: Page 64 has a "Net Cash" figure at 152 million, but that's not actually referring to how much money they actually have, so I think someone just grabbed the figure from there because it was lower. Notably, it's also up from the same figure in 2012, which is only listed in yen, but a quick and dirty conversion puts it about 40 million lower.

Edit: Also I'm no economist, but I'm pretty sure "cash on hand" isn't the same as investment capital they have available for making games. Like I'm pretty sure that doesn't all just happen out of pocket.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

which means that article I found was probably false. Due to either a conversion mistake, or an attempt to bait in readers by riding the capcom hate wave.

well either way, cap seems to be doing fine now.

[Ryong]

why'u stopped on Dead Space 1?

I think the development title for that entire franchise is "Jump scare: The Ripoff"

Dead Space 2 has less terrible controls than usual.

[Magus]

You're thinking of Resident Evil 5.

FTFY

[DarkDrgon]

http://cdn.destructoid.com//ul/259147-bof6.jpg
Capcom is dead to me.

[MuMu]

Regarding the RE talk, Mikami's own words (http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/26/resident-evil-4-came-out-of-the-commercial-failure-of-re-remake)

Regardless of the change in direction, RE4 accomplished something special in that it redefined what “survival” meant in survival horror. “With Resident Evil 1, 2, 3, and all the rest of the series before Resident Evil 4, I was always saying to the staff, ‘Scaring the player is the number one thing.’ But for the first time, in Resident Evil 4, I told the team that fun gameplay is the most important thing. That’s what I said. Then the second thing [would be ] nothing. And then the third thing is to be scary. That’s what I said to the team. That all came out of the commercial failure of the Resident Evil remake. And then of course Resident Evil 4 sold really well. I have kind of a lingering trauma there, because the Resident Evil remake didn't sell – much more than people would think.”

Which is actually pretty sad, the low sales of the widely known as the scariest RE leading to RE4(Which wasn't bad) and to 5(Which was) and scarring the developer :(

[MSperoni]

Ironically their mindless commitment to "what sells" over "making good games" is what got 'em here in the first place. RE6 is a piece of garbage partially because it's aping other games for the sake of "sales" rather than keeping to its own identity.


I didn't like the turn the series took with RE4, but it was better than the subsequent games.

Also I'm kinda surprised he claims that REmake didn't sell all that well. It came out in 2002, which was when the first Resident Evil movie was made. So it's not like there wasn't any buzz for RE stuff.

The wiki article on it says REmake sold 1.5 million copies. Their source is a Capcom (http://capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/million.html) site.

And: "According to January 17, 2007 sales figures provided by Capcom, the GameCube version of Resident Evil 4 has sold a total of 1.6 million units worldwide."

So...100,000 fewer units = relative commercial failure?

(I hate quoting wiki but I didn't feel like doing all that much digging so I just put a link to the source they sourced)

I mean, yes, RE4 eventually went on to sell more units, but it was also released on PS2 (where I think the market was better for M rated titles), PC, and then released as an HD version much later.

Resident Evil 1 Remake only had one shot at release. Plus it was a remake of a seven year old game on a Nintendo system. Not exactly a great place for an M rated game to shine at the time. Also two other games were released on the Gamecube in Japan that year: Mario Sunshine and Windwaker.

And over in North America, a little game called "Metroid Prime" was released that same year.

So yeah, REmake had some stiff competition :P

They followed it up with Resident Evil Zero (which according to the same Capcom source above, sold 1.25 million titles), so they couldn't have been that discouraged.

So I dunno. Mikami obviously knows better than I do :P

Resident Evil is nearing twenty years old, so maybe there's simply not a whole lot they can do with it anymore.

[Krylo]

http://cdn.destructoid.com//ul/259147-bof6.jpg
Capcom is dead to me.

Oh sweet, a new Breath of Fire game.

I hope it's android compatible.

[Magus]

OH MAN I'VE BEEN WAITING YEARS FOR BREATH OF FIRE 6--

wait

what

mobile phone

what

[Bells]

FUCK THIS LIFE!

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Honestly, it being a mobile title isn't a bad thing. Since RPGs work very well with touch controls and most phones and tablets now a days out spec or at least match the 3DS and Vita.

The problem is that it doesn't resemble the BoF series at all, and is going backwards as far as points in time are concerned.

Hopefully it's gameplay will make up for it.

[MuMu]

I also can't wait for Capcom to revolutionize the touchscreen gameplay

[Aldurin]

Looking at the Capcom 30th anniversary steam sale, every game I don't already own is depressingly unappealing. So I can clearly see Capcom's decline.

[Magus]

Also from that screenshot Ryu doesn't have blue hair.

Why, Capcom?