The games developer explains that the survival-horror genre had a very limited market and that they wanted to make the game more accessible to the masses.
Gamers expecting to find Resident Evil 6 a return to the core roots of the once great survival horror series ought to turn away from this article now, as it may cause potential irreversible heartbreak.
Capcom has come out and stated once again what the purists among Resident Evil fans have been reeling from the earlier statement that the developer was aiming to emulate the Call of Duty series.
While very few understood what that meant at the time, it was basically Capcom’s way of saying that they were phasing out the survival-horror tag the series has become so iconic for, in favour of an action-horror genre that would appeal to the masses.
Masachika Kawata, the producer of Resident Evil: Revelations on the Nintendo 3DS explained, “RE4 (Resident Evil 4) started in that direction (more action oriented) and RE5 kept going in that direction. And I think that especially for the North American market,
we need to keep going in that direction and take that a step further.”
It would be wrong to blame America for this like so many of the world’s problems, yet it seems Capcom are looking to make the game more accessible to a wider (American) audience.
He continued, “Looking at the marketing data (for survival horror games)...the market is small, compared to the number of units Call of Duty and all those action games sell. A ‘survival horror’ Resident Evil doesn’t seem like it’d be able to sell those kind
of numbers.”
While we do not doubt the fact that Capcom has done their research on the matter we do have one question and that is the fact that ‘zombies’ are the latest craze in the world with the Walking Dead TV series and the ‘Zombies’ mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops
both extremely popular.
Maybe Capcom ought to focus on delivering an action heavy multiplayer experience while at the same time a survival-horror single player campaign? Then again that could just be our Resi purists part speaking.
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