The folks at Gamasutra have an illuminating interview with Christian Svensson, Capcom’s vice president of strategic planning & business development, discussing how the U.S. branch of the Japan-based firm is trying to increase the fortunes of the mother company with a focus on downloadable titles.
Svensson concedes that the digital titles may not be as “flashy” as the AAA titles like Resident Evil 5 or Street Fighter, but these smaller titles can foster a sense of competition and community. It is this aspect of the smaller titles that drew Capcom’s attention:
That was really what attracted Capcom to it particularly. Any game where you have, on first playable, people screaming commands at each other across the office, you’re probably onto something. It came to us in a state that was already pretty playable and pretty fun, and we’ve just been honing and drilling down on that further and further and further over the past seven, eight months or so.
He goes on to emphasize the community aspects further:
Correct. It’s also about aggregating community, so again, the type of content we’re trying to build here always has some kind of community aspect to it, whether it’s a competitive context, whether it’s a co-op context, whether it’s a user-created content context, and you’re going to see on titles even further out on the horizon when we finally do get around to announcing some of the things for much later ‘08 and into ‘09, that we’re going to become even more aggressive in the scope and scale of these projects.
While the piece is lengthy, there are a lot of interesting insights in there for the tidbit-hungry Capcom fan. I highly recommend checking out the original article.
Leave a Reply