Video Games
The online game business is in turmoil, however 2026 might be Capcom’s profession 12 months. How does the corporate behind ‘Resident Evil Requiem,’ ‘Pragmata,’ and ‘Onimusha: Manner of the Sword’ maintain pumping out hits?
Satoru Nihei is aware of there’s lots using on Onimusha: Manner of the Sword. The brand new samurai motion recreation, a scintillating fusion of cutting-edge swordplay and imaginative, usually grotesquely realized Japanese folklore, is a reboot of a franchise that has lain dormant for 20 years. Greater than that, the sport is the third main launch of 2026 from Japanese large Capcom: It follows the acclaimed launches (in February and April, respectively) of Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth mainline entry within the venerable action-horror sequence, and Pragmata, a brilliantly recent sci-fi shooter starring astronaut Hugh and creepy-cute android woman Diana. That’s not even counting March’s Monster Hunter Tales 3: Twisted Reflection, the most recent entry in a well-received sequence of Monster Hunter spinoffs. On their very own, every of these video games could be a tricky act to comply with. Taken collectively, the problem verges on monumental.
“Gamers have been very proud of these titles,” says Nihei, Onimusha’s director, by means of an interpreter from the Capcom headquarters in Osaka, Japan. He’s dressed sharply, in a floral shirt set above a crisp white tee, with stylish glasses that forgo a high rim, and he speaks with understated modesty. “We positively really feel a little bit of stress on our aspect to have the ability to ship one thing equally as fascinating as these Capcom titles,” he says.
Nihei’s colleague, Onimusha producer Akihito Kadowaki, additionally admits to feeling a bit anxious, though he isn’t actually capable of indulge such feelings on the cusp of the sport’s launch. In mid-August, the week I converse with Nihei and Kadowaki, Capcom is beginning a advertising and marketing marketing campaign that introduces expectant gamers to its hero, the battle-hardened although nonchalant Miyamoto Musashi, and a supporting solid of associates and foes together with the big-bellied and handsomely bearded Ono no Takamura, a reassuring, fatherly presence within the in any other case demonic motion expertise. Quickly after our video name, the crew will jet off to Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, to preview the sport for each press and the general public. “We’ve actually not had any time to fret about being nervous,” says Kadowaki. “We’re simply excited for gamers to get their fingers on the sport and see what we’ve been engaged on.”
No matter nerves might have existed earlier than Manner of the Sword’s launch have presumably dissipated by now. When the overview embargo lifted on Monday, the sport scored glowing reward: IGN dished out a uncommon 10 out of 10, describing it merely as a “rattling high-quality motion recreation.” Eurogamer awarded it 4 stars, writing that “Capcom has as soon as once more proven us it’s a grasp of its craft.” PC Gamer, in the meantime, referred to its lethal samurai duels as a “sturdy contender for the very best fight of the 12 months.”
The Onimusha revival, the primary new main recreation within the sequence since 2006’s Daybreak of Desires, doesn’t simply bookend a glowing 2026 for Capcom; it’s the most recent title in an all-time run of acclaimed releases. Virtually each main gaming publication, together with Kotaku, IGN, Game Informer, and Gamespot, has up to now few years revealed phrases to the impact of “sizzling streak,” “profitable streak,” or “golden age” to explain the deluge of stone-cold motion bangers that the revered Japanese outfit has produced with virtually machinelike consistency. The run contains 2024’s open-world vital darling Dragon’s Dogma 2, whose quintessential fantasy journey is borne by crystalline, hermetic design logic, and crowd-pleasing 2019 romp Satan Might Cry 5, which by some means upped the popcorn spectacle of the already ludicrously over-the-top motion sequence. The new streak even has room for a curio like 2025’s Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, an odd although supremely fascinating mingling of tower protection and hack-and-slash motion with a number of the most luxurious visuals of the present console era (the painstakingly 3D-scanned costumes are to die for).
Excluding remakes and remasters, there have arguably been solely two artistic misses up to now decade or so: 2023’s Exoprimal, an online-multiplayer dino romp, which obtained an mixture rating of 69 on Metacritic throughout all platforms, and the 2021 reboot of action-platformer Ghosts ’n Goblins, which scored a 73.5. Every part else has comfortably scored north of 80. The sheer amount of high quality is hanging.
“The present age is each a refinement and extra experimental than we give it credit score for,” says Will Borger, the IGN critic who simply gave Onimusha: Manner of the Sword its good rating. “Capcom is form of distinctive in that they’ve their huge franchises—Resident Evil and Monster Hunter are the elephants within the room—however they use them to subsidize smaller, riskier video games. Dragon’s Dogma was a danger. Pragmata was a danger.”
You might have a delicate spot for the period during which you first encountered video games developed and revealed by Capcom, which was based in 1983, with company predecessors that dated again to the ’70s. Maybe you’re a fan of its arcade heyday within the mid-Eighties, which options action-platformer classics like Strider. Or its preventing recreation ascendancy within the early ’90s, spearheaded by Avenue Fighter II. I got here to Capcom within the early 2000s, a bit after the discharge of pioneering 3D efforts like the unique Resident Evil, which arrived in 1996. On lengthy, aimless weekends, I’d hearth up my PlayStation 2 and hunker down within the basement, spellbound by Capcom motion magic. Particularly, I used to be enraptured by the quick and livid Satan Might Cry and Viewtiful Joe video games, which didn’t appear to be about solely profitable or finishing a stage, however had been additionally about expressing oneself by means of spectacular, symphonic fight.
Capcom, then, has had many nice eras. That’s, apart from the one from roughly the mid-2000s to mid-2010s, when the corporate’s output was so confused and lackluster that it was dubbed “Crapcom” by cruel followers. Nonetheless, Serkan Toto, a longtime analyst of the Japanese recreation business, is unequivocal concerning the firm’s present standing. “This isn’t a renaissance,” he says from his Singapore workplace. “Capcom was by no means as huge as it’s proper now.”
Toto, who additionally supplies recommendation to gaming traders, factors to Capcom’s inventory worth in recent times. Initially of 2017, Capcom’s shares sat at a bit over 375 yen, or $2.35 in immediately’s {dollars}. By 2025, it had bubbled as much as greater than 5,400 yen, some $33.70, a rise of roughly 14 occasions. “That tells you every thing it’s worthwhile to learn about how the market is appreciating Capcom’s earnings rise,” says Toto. Earnings jumped from $527.1 million in web gross sales for 2017 to $1.2 billion in 2026, with the latter monetary 12 months seeing greater than 59 million items bought, a higher quantity than in every other time in Capcom’s 43-year historical past.
Context is every thing: Capcom’s recreation makers and C-suite executives have pulled off this profitable run whereas the broader online game business, at the very least in North America and Europe, has turn out to be mired in successive crises. Sony has spent a whole lot of tens of millions of {dollars} pursuing a principally failed live-service strategy; Microsoft, below new management, is shedding Xbox studios amid dwindling earnings; and lots of the outfits that had been acquired a number of years in the past by corporations like Embracer and Tencent have been both shut down or handed again to their house owners. Since 2022, an estimated 42,400 online game staff have misplaced their jobs, a determine that led famed designer Brenda Romero to opine that the current feels “crashier” than the precise online game crash of 1983, when an estimated 90 p.c of the business’s whole worth was worn out (with client spending shrinking from some $2 billion to roughly $200 million).
But Capcom appears stronger than ever, for a mess of things in keeping with those that know greatest. “Individuals speak about this sizzling streak,” says Masachika Kawata, the lead producer of each Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata. “However, actually, there isn’t a single purpose for the success.”
Kawata has been with the corporate since 1995. He exudes confidence, sitting again in his chair whereas casually directing the movement of dialog, usually teeing up his colleague Masato Kumazawa, to reply a query. Nonetheless, he continues, “If you wish to zoom out to a extra macro stage, the RE Engine [Capcom’s in-house game-making software] is a large issue.” The veteran producer’s perspective suits the timeline of Toto’s inventory market evaluation. “Earlier than 2017, Capcom’s inventory worth was comparatively flat,” says Toto. “One thing huge occurred that 12 months.”
That “one thing,” asserts Toto, was Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, the very first Capcom recreation to make use of the RE Engine and the catalyst for this ongoing interval of “explosive” monetary development and sterling creativity. In accordance with critics equivalent to Simon Parkin for The Guardian, the sport was an imaginative return to type, “breezily new, but quintessentially in character with its illustrious forbearers.” The motion was seen in first individual after 20 years of third individual, which coincided with an emphasis on immersive, claustrophobic terror and a lower within the shotgun-blasting violence the sequence had turn out to be greatest identified for since 2005’s Resident Evil 4.
Resident Evil 7, whose improvement started in 2014, could be seen as the beginning of Capcom betting huge on itself by coming to the conclusion that it alone might engineer the corporate’s future success, because the in-house RE Engine attests to on a technical stage.
The years prior, within the late 2000s and early 2010s, had been, to place it plainly, a large number for Capcom, each commercially and creatively. The corporate closed 2009 with a 73 p.c revenue drop, and it had an extra 43 p.c revenue loss on the start of 2010 following the underperformance of Misplaced Planet 2 and Monster Hunter Tri. Taken in tandem with the high-profile failures of tasks that Capcom had entrusted to worldwide builders, equivalent to 2012 shooter Dark Void, this led to public statements from Capcom to traders about “radical” R&D restructuring. This was a bid to centralize decision-making and manufacturing—in essence, to deliver recreation improvement again home to Japan.
One former U.S.-based Capcom worker who prefers to stay nameless recollects the time as one rife with soul-searching. It was a case of Capcom “recalibrating,” they inform me. “What are our strengths? We all know we’ve had success. We all know now we have nice folks. We all know we will do issues proper.”
The nadir of those wilderness years was 2012’s Resident Evil 6, which launched to virtually unanimously lukewarm opinions. The sport was emblematic of a broader Capcom id disaster (to not be confused with Dino Disaster): It accommodates no fewer than six playable characters and three distinctive story traces, aiming to cater to each kind of Resident Evil fan whereas spreading itself too skinny to enchantment to any of them. On the time, Kawata, who would obtain exactly that crowd-pleasing synergy with Requiem, was quoted as trying to Name of Responsibility for inspiration. In accordance with the producer’s principle, the globally beloved Resident Evil ought to be doing numbers much like these of the juggernaut army shooter sequence. If it was going to realize that, the sequence wanted to interrupt out of its area of interest survival-horror field. However gross sales failed to satisfy Capcom’s inner expectations: The sport bought 4.5 million items initially, however there was a steep drop-off thereafter.
But it was that form of dud that set the stage for Capcom’s comeback. “If somebody on the surface wanting in thinks, ‘Wow, Capcom is on an actual sizzling streak,’ it’s solely occurred as a result of Capcom has failed lots,” says Kawata. He admits to having “failed” himself, though he tactfully deflects a query about particular bombs with a joke, maybe out of respect to his colleagues. “I’ve failed so many occasions, it’s laborious to choose a single one,” he says, laughing.
Throughout this period, the early-to-mid-2010s, Capcom was concurrently wanting inward and outward. It appeared inward by returning Resident Evil to its outright horror roots, and likewise, Onimusha: Manner of the Sword producer Kadowaki says, by backburnering its mobile ambitions to refocus on its business heartland: the house console. “[Mobile] didn’t actually go so nicely,” explains Kadowaki. “We felt there was a have to return to producing high-quality console video games.” Nihei agrees, noting that there was a serious company-wide effort to prioritize greater requirements. “Relatively than blindly simply producing as many video games as attainable and hoping that some would stick, there was a shift in eager to make much less video games however of upper high quality,” he says.
Nihei’s remark echoes the phrases of former Digital Arts CEO John Riccitiello, who coined the “fewer, greater, higher” technique in 2009. But there’s a essential distinction: In contrast to Digital Arts, Ubisoft, et al., Capcom has largely forgone the “greater” a part of the business technique. Bar the Dragon’s Dogma franchise, Capcom has stubbornly resisted the single-player open-world development. This may additionally be seen as one thing of an inward-looking strategy: Capcom trusted within the motion style that it helped pioneer and enhanced its merchandise reasonably than increasing their scope.
A Story of Two Capcom Many years: Pre- and Put up-RE7
However the firm additionally started to look outward in essential methods: before everything, by courting a genuinely international viewers, exemplified by 2018’s creature-slaying on-line epic Monster Hunter: World. As much as that time, every Monster Hunter recreation had usually bought a number of million copies, virtually solely in Japan. World blasted previous these figures, happening to promote greater than 10 million copies worldwide in its first eight months. Capcom additionally appeared outward by taking note of PC, which might ship visible parity with consoles thanks, partly, to the brand new RE Engine. Right here, Capcom was a trailblazer, courting PC gamers lengthy earlier than any of its console-focused rivals did. In 2013, DmC: Satan Might Cry was launched on PC only a week after consoles. 4 years later, Resident Evil 7 launched concurrently on all main platforms. Now, a bit greater than 60 percent of Capcom’s total gross sales are on PC.
There may be one additional aspect of Capcom’s outward-facing perspective: its willingness to rent worldwide expertise, equivalent to former senior supervisor of world manufacturing Peter Fabiano and former producer Matt Walker, who joined the corporate in 2008 and 2010, respectively. Just a few years later, Resident Evil 7 marked a shift within the recruitment of big-name creatives. Texas author Richard Pearsey, who penned the acclaimed 2012 army shooter Spec Ops: The Line, launched a extra various set of influences, together with Truman Capote’s harrowing nonfiction novel, In Chilly Blood, and the 1974 slasher-movie traditional Texas Chainsaw Bloodbath. Navid Khonsari, who labored on Rockstar titles Grand Theft Auto III and Manhunt, was employed as cinematic director. “Present me one other huge Japanese recreation firm the place foreigners are in such excessive positions,” says Toto.
Though it wasn’t practically as splashy as these hires, Capcom administration made one other inner tweak all through the 2010s by altering its strategy to localization. “The localization crew was all the time making an attempt to make strides, however their purview was restricted,” explains the nameless former Capcom worker. Within the 2010s, this remit broadened and deepened, resulting in the “integration” of the localization crew inside improvement itself and the creation of a brand new localization director position. “After I first began, a recreation could be accomplished after which localized,” they are saying. “Now they’re really a part of the dev crew.”
Nothing that Capcom has finished up to now 10 years, from an institutional, technical, or artistic perspective, has been remotely simple to tug off (because the ailing fortunes of its beleaguered rival Sq. Enix affirm). But now, with these modifications firmly ingrained, Capcom resembles a buzzing army operation. Toto calls it a “battleship” whereas reserving particular reward for what he sees as the corporate’s “astonishing” studio self-discipline. “At a administration stage, the Capcom guys have the juice,” he says. “They know handle all of those studios: maintain them on price range, maintain them on observe, maintain them centered on transport.”
There’s an opportunity this can be a notion generated by means of savvy advertising and marketing: that Capcom proclaims a title solely as soon as it’s assured that it could possibly hit a launch window. Nevertheless, there may be one recreation whose creation seemingly didn’t go completely to plan and whose manufacturing maybe lacked a bit “self-discipline”: Pragmata, which was introduced in 2020 earlier than going darkish for 5 years, languishing in so-called improvement hell, after which resurfacing in 2025 with a 2026 launch date. Throughout that limbo interval, I’d typically tweet wistfully concerning the recreation whose hanging visuals—that includes burly Hugh and tiny Diana gallivanting a few 3D-printed lunar colony—instantly captured my and plenty of different folks’s imaginations.
“When that first preliminary trailer was revealed in 2020, the crew had mainly simply made a prototype of the sport,” reveals lead producer, Naoto Oyama. Crucial components of the sport already existed (particularly, Hugh, Diana, and the moon), however the hack-and-shoot gameplay had but to be conceived. What adopted had been some three years, from 2020 to 2023, of “trial-and-error experiments,” says Oyama. The subsequent three years, from 2023 to the sport’s 2026 launch, had been spent “refining” and “brushing up” the puzzle-action idea. “In fact, the crew by no means thought it will take six years,” admits Oyama. “It was very robust.”
Here’s a tantalizing sidebar: Capcom’s seasoned producer Kawata reveals an alternate model of Pragmata that may have been created had improvement proceeded alongside a special path. It was not the sport’s final director, Cho Yonghee, who got here up with the unique lunar idea, however Jun Takeuchi, head of Video games Improvement Division 1, the a part of Capcom that oversees main franchises equivalent to Resident Evil and Satan Might Cry. “Quite a bit earlier, Capcom experimented with what kind of recreation it might be,” reveals Kawata. “At one level, there was an concept to make one thing a bit bit extra horror centered.” However that idea was discarded, he says, maybe owing to the “self-discipline” recognized by Toto. “Stepping again a bit, this was going to be a brand new sequence, a brand new IP, and so horror, which appears to have lots in frequent with Resident Evil, didn’t appear to be essentially the most compelling use of the brand new title,” says the producer.
Residual components of Pragmata’s horror origins seem within the remaining recreation, significantly the grunt-level, zombielike robots that lumber ahead of their makes an attempt to cut down Hugh and Diana. To extend the harm that Hugh is ready to deal to those foes, the participant hacks their defenses with a easy Snake-like navigation puzzle. It sounds simple, and maybe additionally a bit cumbersome, however the result’s a fizzing, completely trendy motion expertise. Taking part in Pragmata, which tickles each the left and proper components of the mind, is a bit like rubbing your stomach and patting your head, albeit whereas glittering particle results and pulsating, Y2K-influenced techno and gabber pound your cerebral cortex.
For all its acquainted third-person trappings, Pragmata’s remaining hack-and-shoot type is slyly experimental, and arriving at it required experimentation. But there was an extra aspect of out-of-the-box pondering that contributed to the sport’s artistic success: the youth of the event crew relative to these engaged on different Capcom video games. “That was a really aware determination,” says Kawata. “The concept was to attempt to create one thing revolutionary. In that sense, it appeared like a good suggestion to let youthful workers members take the reins.”
One such developer is the director Cho, who stepped into Pragmata’s most senior artistic position in his 40s, a comparatively younger age at which to take action. An artist by commerce, he joined Capcom in 2016, having beforehand designed characters and weapons for acclaimed PlatinumGames titles equivalent to 2013’s Metallic Gear Rising: Revengeance and 2017’s NieR: Automata. His intuition for visible design is an enormous purpose why Pragmata resonated so keenly with gamers. “You have received this little woman in a blue jacket on the moon,” says Oyama. “It simply appears to ring a bell.” Cho additionally possesses a “distinctive” directorial fashion, recollects Oyama, and deftly communicates his concepts with pen and paper. “He was very fast to attract out manga panels of how he envisioned the sport wanting.”
The broader level is that directorial imaginative and prescient stays essential to Capcom’s output, regardless that firm president Haruhiro Tsujimoto outlined a pivot to what he described as a “team-based approach” to recreation improvement in an interview earlier this 12 months. “Within the recreation business, when a title turns into a sequence, it usually finally ends up relying closely on a specific developer, turning into what you’d name an individual-driven title,” Tsujimoto defined. “If that individual doesn’t make one, there’s no subsequent installment. The course of the sequence turns into tied to the concepts of a single creator.”
It sounds a bit like the top of Capcom’s auteur-led days, which noticed, some many years in the past, Shinji Mikami helming the Resident Evil franchise and, extra just lately, Hideaki Itsuno driving the Dragon’s Dogma sequence. (Itsuno departed Capcom in 2025 for startup studio LightSpeed Japan.) However in keeping with its workers, Capcom is hardly pursuing a committee-led strategy. “Clearly, we make video games as a crew, however there needs to be somebody that has that core imaginative and prescient, and that carries us by means of to the top working in live performance with the producers and the event crew,” says Onimusha director Nihei. Kadowaki agrees. “For any recreation’s improvement, there must be somebody that retains issues on job and retains it constant,” he says. “That’s the accountability of the director.”
In a method, Onimusha: Manner of the Sword embodies the present Capcom period greater than even Resident Evil Requiem, which, in its harmonious melding of motion horror and survival horror, felt like a valedictory summation of every thing the sequence is famend for. The rebooted samurai recreation appears to exist concurrently up to now, current, and future. It tells a folkloric story of historic Japan, though each conventional wood constructing and ghastly ghoul is rendered with RE Engine’s gleaming high-fidelity graphics. In an much more daring postmodern mash-up, the sport casts the late Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, star of film classics equivalent to 1961’s Yojimbo, as its hero, summoning his likeness by way of some refined deepfake trickery. Capcom has stressed that it did so with the blessing of his household property.
However it’s within the motion itself that Manner of the Sword most transcends eras. The sport’s clashing blades will really feel acquainted to anybody who performed a Capcom recreation within the Eighties, but swordplay is introduced right here with technically intricate splendor. Blades, Nihei explains, are simulated to bodily meet—metal on metal, so to talk. Simply as spectacular, though not fairly as eye-catching, is how fight encounters now happen on uneven floor, which implies that the blades meet at totally different heights. What the participant experiences is a beguiling mixture of sword physics and meticulously crafted animations, which mix seamlessly to supply a stream of unbroken swordplay throughout diverse terrain. Two remaining prospers promote the showstopping duels: the clanging, grinding sound of metallic assembly metallic and the cartoonish glint that flashes on the display screen because the participant executes an ideal parry. It’s the form of recreation the place one goes on the lookout for fights just because they really feel so good.
So-called recreation really feel, the gathering of sensations skilled by the participant by means of interactions with digital worlds, has lengthy been the calling card of Capcom’s motion output. Matt Leone, founding father of Design Room, a web site that makes a speciality of oral histories of beloved video video games, articulates Capcom’s “recreation really feel” higher than most. He got here to the Japanese large within the late ’80s and early ’90s by way of the beat ’em up Closing Battle and preventing traditional Avenue Fighter II. Leone’s description of these video games is hanging: He might very nicely be speaking a few Capcom title immediately.
“Closing Battle and Avenue Fighter II each had a sure mixture of artwork and mechanics that simply felt extra polished and a step above most different comparable video games on the market,” he says. Leone mentions key frames, the showstopping moments when the motion freezes to indicate off a transfer. He cites Guile’s somersault flash kick in Avenue Fighter II, an animation during which the U.S. Air Power pilot’s legs flail like a propeller in midair. “Capcom are additionally masters of utilizing visuals to point gameplay,” says Leone. “Having the animation sync up in such a method that it’s very clear when you’re punching, when it connects with one other participant.”
These quintessentially Capcom particulars abound in Onimusha: Manner of the Sword. One of the crucial memorable is the animation that happens while you mistime your parry of an particularly heavy blow from an enemy: Within the seconds after, Musashi staggers again, his knees bending and the sword raised above his head horizontally, as if he has resisted the strike with all his energy. The animation drips with fashion, a miniature murals in its personal proper, and it tells you every thing it’s worthwhile to learn about that individual second of the combat.
For IGN critic Borger, an enormous a part of why Manner of the Sword feels so good is that there isn’t generic parry animation: Relatively, Musashi parries particular strikes. Typically, the sport’s fight soars due to the best way it combines visible distinctiveness, well-tuned sound design, and traditional action-genre prospers like hit stops, the just about imperceptible pause in motion as a blow lands that sells the heaviness of impression. “Capcom has a knack for locating the candy spot the place issues simply really feel proper,” says Borger.
Greater than 4 many years into Capcom’s historical past, it’s clear that many people on the firm, together with Onimusha director Nihei, take severely not simply its action-game heritage however all elements of its legacy. The builders of Resident Evil Requiem had been naturally “aware,” says Kawata, of the truth that the sport could be launched lower than a month earlier than the thirtieth anniversary of the franchise. This explains its victory-lap really feel: the return of Leon, the return to Raccoon Metropolis, the wedding of action-horror and survival-horror components—all of which Kawata describes as Capcom “taking the chance to include components that might delight followers of the sequence.”
In fact, Capcom has additionally leveraged its legacy with a sequence of creatively and commercially profitable remakes, together with 2019’s Resident Evil 2 and 2023’s Resident Evil 4. Subsequent 12 months, it’s Resident Evil—Code: Veronica’s flip for the remake remedy. These video games promote like gangbusters: Earlier this 12 months, the Resident Evil 2 remake surpassed Resident Evil 5 because the bestselling sequence entry. “Take a look at the again catalog gross sales from Capcom, which is an enormous driver of the stock-price valuation,” says Toto. “Each single incremental unit that they promote into the market is pure revenue.”
Remakes are the clearest examples of previous and new colliding at Capcom, a energy mirrored throughout all its titles, from the reptilian showdowns of final 12 months’s Monster Hunter Wilds to Avenue Fighter 6’s triumphant 2023 comeback. This is sensible within the context of the corporate’s hiring coverage, which requires recruiting roughly 100 new graduates yearly. “You are bringing in new expertise, recent eyes,” says the previous Capcom worker. “Certain, they have to be taught as a result of they don’t have that sensible expertise. However you’re getting lots of people that may add a brand new dimension.” Capcom’s recent-graduate hires discover themselves in both its Osaka or Tokyo workplaces, not scattered throughout satellite tv for pc places. Perhaps greater than every other online game firm on the planet (with the attainable exception of Nintendo)—actually greater than Western studios decimated by layoffs—Capcom is intergenerational.
Philosophically, the corporate’s pondering appears progressive reasonably than reactive. Capcom is enjoying the lengthy recreation reasonably than chasing short-term bumps in quarterly earnings. “It’s not merely ‘We want 5 extra artists, so let’s go rent 5 extra artists,’” continues the previous Capcom worker. “It’s extra ‘How can we use and leverage the assets which can be out there to us? How can we use externalities that may assist us?’ Capcom has finished a extremely good job of balancing that out.” In each sense, from Capcom’s again catalog to its labor drive and proprietary know-how, the strategy seems constant. “You’re taking your strengths, repurposing them, and presenting them in a brand new method,” they are saying.
However the classes to attract from Capcom might not be significantly replicable. Capcom, as of May 2026, has 3,976 consolidated staff: It operates at a big scale, with a recognizable model and an enviable wealth of beloved IP. It’s additionally primarily based predominantly in Japan, the place staff get pleasure from greater protections by way of employment legal guidelines. Capcom can’t simply hearth giant numbers of its staff to spice up earnings. In fact, that in itself is a lesson: Robust, incremental development twinned with prudence and diligence yields each hearty financial returns and a resilience that the majority main corporations can solely dream of. One bomb can’t kill Capcom. It could take an prolonged streak of stinkers to existentially threaten the corporate.
There’s one other vital cultural distinction between how Capcom and corporations within the U.S. and Europe function. “There’s an overemphasis on undertaking administration within the West by way of Jira [project management software], burn down [the monitoring of remaining work until a project concludes], knowledge monitoring, and job administration that doesn’t essentially flip right into a recreation,” says the previous Capcom worker. It’s not that Capcom doesn’t have undertaking administration, however the producer position there may be extra akin to that of a film producer. Basically, “the producer has artistic oversight,” they are saying. “Clearly, the director has the ultimate name, however you are working with them to say, ‘This is not going to resonate with gamers,’ or ‘That is going to take too lengthy,’ or ‘We do not have the timeline or price range to do this.’ Whereas within the West, manufacturing was extra born from undertaking administration and Microsoft software program improvement. It is timelines and charts.”
The query now, after Capcom’s all-timer 2026, is the place the corporate will go from right here. Extra Resident Evil, actually, and extra Monster Hunter sooner or later, though the discharge slate for Capcom’s different main franchises and new IP is wanting decidedly quieter. There may be presumably a brand new Satan Might Cry within the works, though with out the involvement of its directorial guru, the just lately departed Itsuno. Nonetheless, the Capcom categorical speeds on, albeit with a higher emphasis on scripted variations: Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil film arrives in a number of weeks (a PR rep steps in to nip any dialogue of it with Kawata and Kumazawa within the bud); Avenue Fighter follows subsequent month, and its new trailer is large, boneheaded enjoyable. (Director Kitao Sakurai appears to basically get the video games.) These big-screen variations comply with two largely profitable seasons of Netflix’s anime tackle Satan Might Cry, which helped catapult Satan Might Cry 5 to document annual sales.
I ask longtime producer Kawata about the way forward for Capcom by means of the lens of Resident Evil. “There’s nonetheless issues concerning the sequence that Capcom hasn’t but determined. We’re nonetheless investigating, exploring in a mess of how,” he says. For Kawata, who sees himself as one thing of a “franchise custodian,” the query of the long run is in the end for one more day, and it’s one which issues him lower than it does his youthful colleagues.
“Inside the bounds of respecting and treating the world of Resident Evil very fastidiously, I’m most fascinated by the place the subsequent era goes, what sort of video games they’ll make,” says Kawata. With the youthful producer Kumazawa sitting proper subsequent to him, it’s as if Kawata is each throwing down the gauntlet and passing the baton to Capcom’s new blood, difficult the corporate’s upstarts to create their very own golden age.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis Gordon is a author and journalist residing in Glasgow who contributes to shops together with The Verge, Wired, and Vulture.