Capcom Values Good Reviews As Much as Sales

Capcom has been making a lot of good decisions as of late. The new Resident Evil game was uniformly praised, and everyone is still happy with all the changes they made to the Monster Hunter series when they released World. And personally, I still hold them in pretty high esteem for publishing Dragon’s Dogma, which I still think is one of history’s great unrecognized RPGs. That said, the next game they’re preparing to share with the world is slightly less revolutionary: a remake of Resident Evil 2. Capcom re-releasing Resident Evil games is about as predictable as the sun rising every morning, and yet, this particular remake has people’s attention due to the fact it seems particularly high-quality.

Something Capcom Europe COO Stuart Turner talked about to Gamesindustry.biz, especially to how it related to Capcom’s idea of a “successful” game.

"While we have shareholders to appease, it's not just about commercial performance. There is an artistic element that always comes in where we know this is the right way. And while if we compare RE7 to RE6 the absolute numbers are not the same, in terms of the profitability... it's completely fine. It ticked all of our boxes internally. It was really well received.

And in some respects, getting some very good review scores counts as much for Capcom as a game that sells millions and millions and millions. We'd prefer a game that got a 9 and sold less, than got a 6 but sold more."

That’s an admirable attitude I actually find kind of hard to believe. I mean, I want to believe they have enough artistic integrity to value a game’s quality over its sales, but it goes against pretty much every other developer in the world. But the fact it was spoken aloud at all is a pretty sweet sentiment, so I’ll take it at face value.

Can’t hurt to believe it, after all.