14 DAY TRIAL // There's a wave of financial results announcements hitting the videogame industry, as accountants finally make sense of what happened in the first quarter of the financial year 2009, which starts, rather absurdly, on March 31, 2008. Capcom is the latest publisher to reveal its situation and the results are not too bad.
Officials from the Japanese company, which has several internal development studios, say that overall profits for the company have gone up to more than 37 million dollars, which is a whopping 60% more than in the same period of the last year. The most important source of growth for the company is its videogames business, which brought it an operating profit that grew by over 90%.
The best performer was, by far, the PlayStation Portable title Monster Hunter Freedom 2G which, for the moment, has reported sales that are well over 2.4 million copies. It is the first time in the history of the PSP that a title designed specifically for the handhled console from Sony broke the 2 million unit mark on the Japanese market. The game lead to a veritable revival of the PSP, which had been trailing the Nintendo DS in sales; thus, it has been at the top of the Japanese hardware charts for quite a while. Except for Monster Hunter, the company focused on "mainly small-scale titles including spin-off software and repeated sales of existing products".
Capcom is expecting its videogames division to do well in the rest of the year. Devil May Cry 4 has just been launched and should sell well, especially amongst fans of the franchise, while autumn will see the release of Mega Man 9, a retro revival title, and of a new Castlevania game, again featuring Dracula.
Capcom is also heavily involved on the Japanese arcade market, but several circumstances, including higher costs, have made the arcade division less profitable than expected.