It’s no secret that Capcom is absolutely killing it right now. Monster Hunter Wilds, Resident Evil Requiem, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Pragmata, Street Fighter 6– almost every game that Capcom has published in the last five years, other than Exoprimal, has been both a critical and financial success. While everyone seems to credit Capcom’s never-ending streak of hits to something different, President and COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto credits its recent success to its new “team-based approach to game development.”
As part of Capcom’s 43rd anniversary celebrations, Tsujimoto recently sat down with Famitsu (via Automaton) to discuss everything from the current state of the game industry to the publisher’s generational run of bangers. However, the latter topic is, personally, the most interesting part of the interview, as Tsujimoto credited Capcom’s latest accomplishments to its departure from auteur-led projects.
“In the game industry, when a title becomes a series, it often ends up depending heavily on a particular developer, becoming what you’d call an individual-driven title,” Tsujimoto explained. “If that person doesn’t make one, there’s no next installment. The direction of the series becomes tied to the ideas of a single creator.”
“We discussed the issue with the central figures behind each franchise and ultimately agreed that we should abandon that approach,” he continued. “What we came up with instead was the idea that every title should essentially be rebuilt from the ground up. We didn’t mind even if sales temporarily declined as a result, and by switching to a team-based approach to game development, Capcom changed dramatically.”
It’s easy to forget these days, but Capcom was struggling for the first half of the 2010s. Street Fighter V had an extremely rough launch, Resident Evil 6 was less than stellar (to put it lightly), and the internet wasn’t particularly thrilled with DmC: Devil May Cry’s new direction. Some of the publisher’s riskier ventures, such as Asura’s Wrath and Lost Planet 3, also massively underperformed financially, and the company’s future suddenly seemed uncertain.
The turning point for Capcom was the release of Resident Evil 7 in 2017, and its shift to first-person was seen as a big departure from the action-focused, horror-lite trajectory the franchise had become known for at the time. While Tsujimoto didn’t mention a specific title during the interview, Resident Evil 7’s release does seemingly mark this pivot away from auteur-focused projects, considering that it was swiftly followed by the likes of Monster Hunter World and Resident Evil 2 Remake.
It is a bit of an odd statement to hear from Capcom, though. After all, many of its most successful franchises were created as a result of auteurs, such as Shinji Mikami’s work on the original Resident Evil and Hideki Kamiya’s Devil May Cry. Likewise, one of Capcom’s bright spots in the early 2010s was Dragon’s Dogma, which was conceptualized by director Hideaki Itsuno.
Of course, it’s equally interesting to note that, in the past two decades, all three of those auteurs have left Capcom, which perhaps explains why the publisher experienced that rough dip in the 2010s, and why its upper management chose to focus on its new “team-based approach” to development. Maybe it was a decision made more out of necessity, but it’s hard to argue with Tsujimoto’s results.