Peek At Capcom’s Long Term Portfolio Strategy

Last September, Capcom announced that they were reorganizing their corporate structure to be able to meet the needs of a variety of markets, including both mainstream and niche audiences, under newly-appointed Corporate Director, Jun Takeuchi.

While that previous announcement dealt more with internal development structure, a new management report tells us just how this will affect the releases of Capcom’s games in the future. Going forward, Capcom plan to bank on three strategies to ensure a steadier flow of profits:

• Increasing their output of downloadable games and downloadable content for traditional games.
• Strengthening development of online PC games for Asian markets.
• Steadily releasing sequels to popular brands in the traditional games market.

With regard to the first point on that list, Capcom say they plan to provide online connectivity for all major home video game titles.

The above is a chart outlining Capcom’s game release strategy, comprising major as well as smaller to medium scale titles (in terms of brand). While we couldn’t tell you what franchises Series A through E pertain to exactly, Capcom consider Resident Evil, Street Fighter and Monster Hunter to be major titles, while Sengoku Basara and Ace Attorney fall into the latter category.

Because large-scale titles take a long time to develop, Capcom plan to bank heavily on outsourcing and strengthening their relationships with overseas developers to ensure they have adequate resources allocated to releasing a steady flow of successful games. They’re also going to strengthen recruitment of new internal developers to work on projects, and are allocating resources specifically for the development of entirely new titles.

In a nutshell, the current plan is “more games across more platforms.” With that many games a year, you’ve got to wonder how these releases will be spaced out.

Traditionally, publishers tend to release their biggest titles during the fourth quarter of any given year, close to the holiday season. Capcom plan to avoid meeting the competition head on by releasing major titles in every single quarter of the calendar year.