14 DAY TRIAL // Capcom has issues its financial results for its third fiscal quarter, that ended on June 30 of this year. The company says that overall sales of video games went down by 2.4 percent during the period, to 19.03 billion Yen, which is about 217.7 million dollars, while the profits plunged even more spectacularly at a rate of 90% to reach just 2.2 billion Yen, the equivalent of 25.3 million dollars.
The main culprit for the bad performance of Capcom has been the weak launch of Lost Planet 2, its biggest profile game of the period, which has been judged to have “underperformed its projection substantially”. A statement from Capcom also said that “While U.S. and European markets are shrinking under the stagnating economy, performance of our flagship title Lost Planet 2 struggled to grow in these regions”.
Capcom says that it is responding to the poor climate for big video game launches by focusing on more online titles and on more gaming experiences that are created specifically for the Western market. The iPad version of Resident Evil 4 is said to be doing quite well, with sales rising gradually, with the mobile version for Apple devices for both Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and Street Fighter IV also contributing to the bottom line of the company.
Capcom has recently said that it plans to shorten development cycles for its biggest franchises, like Resident Evil and Street Fighter, in an effort to sell more game packages and create purchasing habits for fans. This does not address the basic fact that Capcom still has some very Japanese sensibilities when it comes to how it designs games and that Western players are sometimes not interested in the products they put out.
Recently Capcom and Namco announced that they are working on a cross over fighting titles based on the Street Fighter and the Tekken series. Each of the companies will use the same cast of shared characters while building different fighting systems.