Has Capcom figured out the formula for a sustainable game studio? Not quite. The upcoming Hunter of wild monsters It took about 5-6 years to develop, so it's clear that the Japanese developer/publisher is still making the same big, risky bets on AAA games as many of its peers do.
But unlike its peers, Capcom isn't suffering huge losses or stumbling through avoidable layoffs. broke sales records in 2023 and it's still sailing strong until 2024despite there being no major releases coming up until Hunter of wild monsters lands in 2025. It's a bit surreal to look at a company that once has had a very poor success with its operations in North America now they seem like a pillar of stability.
What is he doing well? According to Savages Game Director Yuya Tokuda, Executive Producer Ryozo Tsujimoto, and Art Director Kaname Fujioka, there’s no one practice that drives the studio. But as they explained in a conversation at Gamescom 2024, there’s a unique culture of communication in the development of the widely used RE engine, between game developers on different games, and between developers and sales teams around the world, that makes its success strategy stand out in a turbulent 2024.
RE Engine is made to serve many games
The technical Swiss Army knife at the heart of Capcom's development process is the RE Engine. While the name refers to the long-running Resident Evil series for which it was initially created, it has since been used in games such as Dragon Dogma 2, Street Fighter 6, The devil can cry 5and also Ghosts and Goblins – The Resurrection.
The engine follows in the footsteps of MT Framework, Capcom's first studio-wide game engine, released in 2006. Dead man rising again. Framework's legacy lives on in other ways, too, according to Tsujimoto. “We're very focused on cross-platform releases at Capcom, and we need an engine that can run on multiple platforms. [types of] hardware,” he said. MT Framework was a “great porting engine” and its strengths were replicated for the development of the RE Engine.
Today, the Hunter of wild monsters Capcom teams and other developers work “closely” with RE Engine engineers and benefit from a “rapid feedback loop” to request features or bug fixes that slow down development.
It seems simple enough at first glance, but Capcom isn't the only video game company to mandate the use of a single in-house engine. At companies like EA, the practice has to have been blamed to slow down the development of games not based on the genre the engine was created for. The difference, Tsujimoto explained, is that no single game or franchise has the final say on RE Engine updates.
Image via Capcom.
“We have the flexibility to work with them on a priority list,” he said. If the Hunter of wild monsters If the team makes a request that they can't immediately fulfill, they aren't told “no” but are instead brought into a pipeline conversation, which they can participate in because they are aware of all the other games in development and their technical needs.
Indeed, having Capcom developers in constant dialogue with each other is common practice. From the way he described it, there doesn’t seem to be a habit of isolating teams from each other on secret or need-to-know projects. “Our teams all work very closely together, even on different titles,” he said. “We’re able to share ideas, discoveries, and technologies with each other.”
That sense of cooperation extends to sales teams in Japan and around the world. Tsujimoto seemed to nod to the fact that the Monster Hunter series' huge sales numbers come from regions outside of the U.S. and Japan, saying the company has developed a “close” relationship with the teams that market and distribute the game in those regions.
The close relationships between game developers and vendors are a bit unusual, but the series' ever-growing popularity appears to be shaping the production process in several significant ways.
Is five years too long to make a game like this? What does Monster Hunter Wild mean?
Although not all Hunter of wild monstersThe developers worked on the project for the entire 5-6 years of its development (Fujioka, the art director, said that the team also worked on Monster Hunter on the Rise and its expansion Sunshade in that time period), is still a staggering amount of time to work on a single game. Fujioka told Game Developer that its expanded development was driven in part by the series’ growing player base, whose existence increased the amount of time dedicated to research and development.
“The more people joined the series, the more we had to think about how we could actually meet the needs of our users when we started a new project,” he said. “There are so many more players now, and they [possess] a broader level of skills and experience with the [series].”
It is worth emphasizing this in particular. Savages' great upheavals to the Monster Hunter formula. The game is set in a series of open worlds where players can engage in more open-ended hunts, tracking different monsters and mimicking the role of a hunter in a real-world ecosystem. Not all players can seamlessly navigate the transition between gameplay types, and adapting them (apparently with input from global sales teams) has been a key part of the process.
As the game's director, Tokuda was the one who “felt” the long years of development SavagesTsujimoto joked. Tokuda told us that he’s been creatively invested in exploring the “monster ecosystem” at the heart of the series ever since he first saw the first game’s trailer over 20 years ago. But for the team to push the boundaries of that development philosophy, it increases the scale of the project, which “inevitably comes at a cost in terms of resources, and one of those resources is ‘time,’” he noted.
His passion for the “monster ecosystem” is palpable, and he tells us that Capcom has reached the point where they can “push the boundaries” in how it’s represented on screen. “Not just in terms of the visuals, but just feeling like you’re jumping into this living, breathing world,” he said.
Are half-decade-long development cycles worth the hype? For gamers, probably. For developers, well, we’ll have to wait until 2025 to find out for sure.