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A Serious Wake-up Call for Capcom

A Serious Wake-up Call for Capcom

Capcom has turned a pivotal corner, and decided that it’s probably a good idea to finish games before it releases them. Apparently this is a major shift in priorities, one that merits headlines, official statements, and the whole shebang. While this is certainly indicative of a growing problem in our industry as a whole, Capcom is providing us with a timely case study of what happens when you don’t make your number one goal to release a game when it’s finished; when it’s great.

Capcom CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto has openly admitted that the launch of Street Fighter V was a disaster. During a recent financial earnings call the disappointing sales were brought up. Tsujimoto responded by stating that a hard lesson had been learned and that development periods for a small number of titles had been restructured to “prioritize completeness” over release deadlines. “For games to be hits at the global level they must be high quality,” he said during the session. “To this end, as a result of judging it necessary to spend a little more time on the development and operation of titles that are not yet up to that standard, we have revised the development periods for a small number of titles.”

Can we just stop for a moment and take another look at that first statement? “For games to be hits at the global level they must be high quality.” Are you kidding me? Did this really have to be said? Have we really enabled an industry that bows so devoutly to the idol of haste that we’re okay with sacrificing wholeness? It would seem that we have. After all, we don’t think twice about day-one patches – multiple gigabytes in size – and we accept the fact that game-breaking bugs come with the territory when dealing with huge, online games like The Division .

It’s an issue that we sweep under the rug as long as we have fun playing our games. We don’t have to talk about it as long as it doesn’t become too big of a problem, but with Street Fighter V it was too big of a problem. I gave the game a pretty glowing review because I am the exact type of player that Capcom was catering to by releasing this game early. I was anxious to dive straight into online multiplayer because, for me, that’s the only part of the game that matters. Sure, I played through the story mode in Soul Calibur IV , but only when my online wasn’t working. If I’m playing a fighting game, I’m playing it against another human being. I don’t need an arcade mode, I just need a deep fighting system and new mechanics that excite me. Street Fighter V delivered exactly what I and the competitive community was waiting for, but for millions of others, the game was unforgivably lacking in content.

A Serious Wake-up Call for Capcom

Not only did SFV receive extremely mixed reviews, it also ended up selling about 600,000 fewer copies than Capcom had originally projected. Fans voiced their complaints, and Capcom heard them loud and clear: “This is a joke. We have no story mode, no arcade mode, and no trials mode.” It didn’t help that the first few days after launch online servers experienced a few hiccups. Pokken Tournament outsold Street Fighter V in Japan and the US, for crying out loud. Pokken Tournament! This is a brand new IP for the Wii U, a console that only sold a little over 10 million systems. That’s unbelievable, considering almost 40 million of us own PS4s.

Well, it took the failed launch of one of Capcom’s most iconic IPs, but at least the company got the message. Who knows, maybe if sales and public opinion improve with this new shift in priorities, other publishers will follow suit? I blasted Capcom, but I’ll be there day-one for Monster Hunter Generations… and it better have a story mode.

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