Capcom Detail Their Online And DLC Plans For The Next Few Years

As previously reported, Capcom’s major strategies going forward involve two main initiatives—to manage their console games business more efficiently and to strengthen their online games business. The slide below shows how Capcom envision their next few years playing out, in terms of how much content they’ll provide to different markets:

Capcom’s content mix plans. Click to enlarge.

The green bars represent mobile content. The yellow bars are for PC online content. The light blue bars are for “connected console services,” which sounds like DLC and downloadable games like Ducktales Remastered. Finally, the purple bar is retail games. It makes sense for retail games to take up less space in the overall content mix, since those games take far longer to develop than mobile and browser games do.

Bottom line—like with several other publishers, online is a big deal to Capcom. Mobile games, PC online games and downloadable content (for retail games) make up Capcom’s online strategy. The following slide shows how much of each they expect to put out over the next couple of years, as part of their online business:

Capcom’s online content forecast with our observations. Click to enlarge.

Once again, the green bars represent mobile games. The yellow bars represent PC content. Finally, the light blue bars represent DLC. If you look at the graphs for 2013 and 2014, you’ll see a significant increase in PC content—a 42% increase, much larger than the 13.5% of mobile and 15.4% of DLC. Capcom will be ramping up PC operations a fair bit.

“Our goal is to raise sales in our online businesses to 30 billion yen [note: nearly $300 million] in the fiscal year ending in March 2015,” says Capcom president and COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto.

That said, Capcom aren’t giving up on the traditional games market. Monster Hunter 4 is expected to rake in big sales in Japan this fiscal year, with Resident Evil: Revelations and Lost Planet 3  listed as major global titles. Capcom also point to Ace Attorney 5 and Sengoku Basara 4 as proven titles for the Japanese market. Finally, Deep Down is in development for PlayStation 4, and Capcom are re-organizing themselves for next-gen development, while trying to improve the quality of their games.

Information and slides courtesy Capcom’s investor website.