We’re halfway through 2026, and so far, Capcom is on a roll. Resident Evil: Requiem, Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection, and Pragmata have all been hit games, while other titles like Street Fighter 6 continue to do well with post-launch content. So what’s Capcom’s secret? According to the company itself, having a team-first mentality instead of auteur-driven games is one of its keys to success.
“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,” COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto and Capcom founder Kenzo Tsujimoto said to Famitsu (via Automaton). “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,” Tsujimoto said.
According to the COO, this was the case for many years at Capcom, but as it started to examine its responsibilities to its shareholders, things began to change for the company. After talking to central figures behind its franchises, Capcom abandoned individual-driven development in favor of team-driven projects. “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,” Tsujimoto added.
Capcom had a long history with its games having big names behind them, like Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry), Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil), and Hideaki Itsuno (Dragon’s Dogma). The Capcom renaissance–which is largely considered to have started when Resident Evil 7 was released in 2017–has seen the company move forward with this shift toward team-driven games.
The risk with creator-driven games is that not every title is guaranteed to be a hit, with notable examples being Peter Molyneux’s Godus or Tomonobu Itagaki’s Devil’s Third. Recently, former Yakuza game series director Toshihiro Nagoshi appears to have run into trouble at his self-named studio, Nagoshi Studio. Reports of publisher NetEase pulling financial backing and the studio’s YouTube channel vanishing-then-reappearing quietly emerged in May, and since then, it has been nothing but radio silence for Gang of Dragon.
Meanwhile, gaming’s most-famous auteur, Hideo Kojima, is as busy as ever with various game projects and dismissing rumors of there being trouble in paradise with his longtime pal, Geoff Keighley.