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Capcom reinvesting MH4 profits into new 4 billion yen internal Japanese mobile studio

crinale

Member
Update:

Mod Edit: Aquamarine has access to the full article as well and made an additional summary:

When the PS3 / 360 released, development investment increased from 15 billion JPY ($146.5 million) to 30 billion JPY ($293.0 million). The great thing about mobile and portable game development is that the expectations are lower (much lower for mobile) in terms of development commitment from the staff.

Essentially, Capcom wants to invest heavily in the smartphone gaming realm as an avenue for future growth opportunities. Capcom's mobile sector has been lagging recently, and they want to invest in it to increase their operating margin in that area.

The president of Capcom says the way for Capcom to dedicate resources to mobile development (in terms of both expertise and flexibility) is to increase the percentage of in-house development dedicated to it. To this end, Capcom is using 4 billion JPY ($39.1 million) of the revenue from Monster Hunter 4 to create a new studio in Osaka (where Capcom's HQ is located), and they are ramping up development staff accordingly.

The new center in Osaka still has a possibility of being multi-purpose, though.

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sörine;91970635 said:
Download cards could explain the difference between this and the Famitsu charts.

Also interesting but I didn't realize mobile was declining for Capcom. Trouble in paradise?

They never had good team for mobile games (basically they outsourced everything). Recently they declared that they'll use profits from Monster Hunter to establish new in-house mobile game teams.
 

crinale

Member
sörine;91972291 said:
I know Capcom has an established western subsidiary for mobile development (Beeline) but I thought their Tokyo studio already made mobile/social games too?

The new studio will be build at Osaka, costing them like 4bil yen. The money came from profit of the MH, so some Japanese business magazine's article said.
 

crinale

Member
Do you have any links btw? Japanese is fine.

I'd like to clone yours posts into a new thread, but we usually like to include a link unless it was a physical magazine or TV show that inherently can't be linked.

I'll probably still clone out even if you don't since I think it's a rather interesting look at how a major Japanese publishing is using their funds.

The original article was from Diamond Magazine that had more details like where the money came from, but you have to pay to read web version.

As for brief excerpt I found a newspaper article below.

http://sankei.jp.msn.com/smp/west/west_economy/news/131106/wec13110617050005-s.htm

Edit: Found an summary of the original article (in Japanese).
http://kotetsu.game-waza.net/ゲーム売上・考察/カプコン「モンハン4」の利益40億円を投じスマホ向け

Edit2: There a direct link to Diamond Magazine's article within above page if any of you are subscribers just in case.
The article is saying that Capcom is trying to strengthen the weakest area, by using its profit (that is from Monster Hunter, for this year).. And now Capcom's weakest area is mobile games, so they say within the article.
 

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Clone bump.

Thanks for assembling this btw.

I'm curious to see what they put out with this given their renewed interest in mobile judging by the 500 announcements and now a new internal studio.
 

falconzss

Member
whyareeveryonehavingas1s4o.gif
 

OmegaDL50

Member
Is this truly the future? Looks bleak.

I'm sure there are some decent mobile titles like FF Dimensions, but I just don't how some Japanese devs are making dedicated console and handheld gaming as a secondary objective to pushing mobile, based on all of these recent announcements and such.
 

Vodh

Junior Member
Please tell me it's a studio working on next-gen games, just sitting in a fucking truck hence 'mobile'?
 

Sandfox

Member
Namco, save us...

I'm honestly surprised that Namco isn't making more mobile games given the sheer volume of titles they put out and how many licensed titles they seem to get.

Please tell me it's a studio working on next-gen games, just sitting in a fucking truck hence 'mobile'?

Seeing as how Capcom's console games have been doing lately I'm not sure they are going to rush to develop a ton of new AAA ones.
 
seriously who keeps pushing this mobile shit
above:because the world would explode if they even thought of making Tales mobile, imagine the Vesperia backlash only 10x worse
 
I'm not at all surprised by this, to be honest. I was thinking they were going to go with mobile focus sooner or later, especially after the disastrous PR they've been getting from the console market in the past years.

seriously who keeps pushing this mobile shit

The fact the mobile market is huge. I.e. the $.
 
Are mobile games really that lucrative for publishers? Games like Angry Birds and games that are easy to play with a phone definitely sell well and why wouldn't they? However, how successful are games that Capcom would make? How did that Deus Ex mobile game fare and other games with a long story?

To me it just seems like a mobile phone game should be basic and very simple that you can play for 5 minutes and have a good time. There's no way that I'd want to play Dragons Dogma 2 on my phone because I'd probably have sensory overload with incoming texts, notifications and other distractions. It just seems bad to me and not very appealing.
 

Sandfox

Member
Maybe they are smart enough to know that dumping everything into mobile is not a good idea.

They obviously shouldn't put everything on mobile but given how they put out a ridiculous number of games a year its kinda weird they don't have more mobile titles.
 
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