Capcom has made an interesting admission about how 2024 is going for them so far.
As things stand, we know that Capcom has not had a lot of games to release this year. We saw the rerelease of the Apollo Justice games to modern platforms as Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy in January 25.
That was followed by Dragon’s Dogma 2, which came to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam on March 22. They then just released Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess last July 19 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam, on July 19.
And then, in last month’s Nintendo Direct, Capcom made the surprise reveal of Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics. We don’t have a date for this one yet, but it’s surprisingly coming to a limited set of platforms, in the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.
The Ace Attorney and Marvel vs. Capcom collections are certainly made for their older fans, and give n the smaller dev budgets, have a decent chance to be profitable. Capcom took bigger risks with Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Kunitsu-Gami. But with nothing else announced, and Capcom actually winding down their foray into live-service with PvPvE title Exoprimal, they don’t actually have that much going on this year.
Capcom recently had their latest earnings call, and one of their investors actually called them out on this. As Capcom translated it, this was his question:
“It seems like you have few noteworthy new titles this year. How do you plan to execute on your sales strategy this fiscal year specifically?”
This was how Capcom addressed their concern:
“For the past nine fiscal years we have delivered at least 10% operating profit growth each year regardless of the number of new title releases. One factor behind this has been the increase of global unit sales for new and catalog titles combined.
This year we are targeting a 9% year-over-year increase in unit sales volume, from last fiscal’s 45.89 million units to this year’s 50 million units. Going forward we look to achieve our forecast by carrying out activities to increase brand awareness and via pricing strategies.”
It’s a little crazy to think that Capcom was doing that well, not just for the last five years, but the last nine years. We did a quick check and the earliest years in there had famous flops like Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite alongside modest hits, not blockbusters, such as Mega Man Legacy Collection and Resident Evil: Revelations 2.
In terms of how their developers have grown and learned, we can see how those last two games pushed Capcom to their latest direction. They have since moved the Resident Evil franchise back to its horror roots, and released more collections of their classic games.
But it seems Capcom knows how to make money in more subtle ways than just make big bets on big budget games. We’re sure they have a real game plan to reach their sales goal this year, and that there’s a good chance that they can actually reach it.
