Capcom forms strategy to improve product quality
It has been said before and it will definitely be said again the coming days, Capcom seems to have lost its touch.
One simply needs to grab a copy of Resident Evil 6 from the nearest retailer or purchase a copy through digital channel to know just why the once-great publisher finds itself on the hot-seat.
The latest title in the horror survival third-person zombie shooter is not the greatest game to have been produced and the numerous issues plaguing the game and issues with the gameplay was a constant reminder of that.
For a company that had brought us Resident Evil 2, Street Fighter, Mega-man and Devil May Cry, criticism seems like a rather harsh and unfair treatment, but unfortunately none of it seems without merit.
This is something that the company itself realises and therefore had its strategists hitting the drawing board to come up with a new plan to return the reputation of the company to its former glory.
For a company that has seen the top and remained there for quite a while, it is not easy to tolerate the deterioration of its reputation and therefore a quick reaction to the situation was expected.
That is exactly what has happened as Capcom revealed during a question and answer session with the investors that it has decided to put more faith in its internal development team instead of outsourcing production of its projects to western studios.
In a bid to make its own development capabilities even better, more jobs are being added to the company with the intended motivation of taking the development team from 1,500 to 2,500 over the course of ten years.
The publisher told the investors that by giving more development responsibilities to its internal team, there would not be any significant change in development expenditures, though the production quality is expected to rise.
“We want to further improve the quality of our games by maintaining an internal game development team,” Capcom informed the investors. “The purpose of increasing our game developer team is to create a larger percentage of our games internally. We believe that there will be no significant change in total development expenditures mainly because we will be shifting outsourced operations to our own workforce.”
This is indeed a big decision to take by a company that has been collaborating for foreign developers for many years now and a number of its renowned games have the involvement of a western studio.
Take the example of the latest title in the Devil May Cry franchise for instance. The highly-anticipated game is currently in the process of getting finishing touches at Ninja Theory, a UK-based studio.
Other games which have been produced in studios outside of Japan include Bionic Commando, Dead Rising, Lost Planet 3 and Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. The list is longer, but the titles mentioned will suffice to show the reliance of the Japan-based published on western studios during some of its renowned games.
It will indeed be interesting to see how Capcom manages to strengthen its internal development team and raise them to a level where the need to collaborate with western studios will decrease before eventually disappearing completely.
Another thing to see is whether this decision proves to be as effective as Capcom expects, or if it is forced to make a u-turn on its decision somewhere down the road.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely of the writer’s and do not reflect bettor.com’s official editorial policy.
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