By 2022, Capcom’s Chairman and CEO, Kenzo Tsujimoto, aims to turn the company into the world’s #1 provider of digital content. 2022 is a decade away, and while ten years is a long time, Capcom already have short-term goals they’d like to accomplish in order to build up to this long-term objective.
We’ve summarized these goals before. They boil down to:
- Shortening the development times for games.
- Consistently releasing sequels while releasing brand new titles as well.
- Increasing development staff.
- More social/online games for mobile and PC.
- Release DLC (downloadable content) to give console games a longer lifespan.
In a statement to investors, chairman Tsujimoto expounded upon each of these goals in a little more detail. Here’s a quick understanding of what each one involves, just to give you a better idea of what Capcom’s management have in mind.
Shortening development times: Capcom hope to reduce development times from the usual 3-4 years to only 2.5 years. Speeding up development times will increase the cost of development, but Capcom believe that creating quality content quickly is vital to their ability to remain competitive.
Consistent sequels while creating brand new games: Shortening development times will mean that games in popular brands will see more frequent releases, but Capcom also say they intend to keep releasing brand new games. While brand new titles with low awareness are unlikely to be a hit the first time around, Capcom say they will keep investing in new games and develop them into new sources of earnings.
Increasing development staff: Over the next decade, Capcom plan to hire about 1,000 employees, adding over 100 developers every year. This is because advances in technology and platforms will demand increased development staff that are trained to keep up. Capcom plan to hire and train their own talent internally, and nurture the next generation of creators.
More social/online games for mobile and PC: Capcom expect that the market for mobile content will double between 2012 and 2016, and that the PC online games market will increase by 126% during the same time. Thus, they will invest heavily in both these areas to take advantage of the market.
DLC for traditional games: Unlike mobile and PC online, Capcom don’t expect to see an increase in the realm of packaged software. However, they do expect growth of about 26% in the packaged software category after factoring in DLC sales. In fiscal year 2011, Capcom made 2.8 billion yen ($35 million) in DLC sales. For fiscal year 2012, they expect to increase this number to 3.5 billion yen ($43.8 million).
For the ongoing fiscal year (FY2012), Capcom hope to reach 105 billion yen ($1.3 billion) in net sales for the first time, and expect to see record high figures for all income categories, owing to a strong slate of upcoming titles such as Resident Evil 6, DmC Devil May Cry and the recently released Dragon’s Dogma.
