Capcom: Japanese Gaming's Lolcow - DetroitOtaku Rants

Lolcow (n) - A person or group of people laughed at for actions that they take, despite not trying to be funny. They may try to take themselves seriously, but they are often "milked" for laughs with or without their knowledge.

Ah yes, Capcom. What was once one of the major pioneers of Japanese gaming. A company that is currently living off it's past glories to try and stay alive. A company that is so horribly mismanaged that they've been run into the ground numerous times over. A company that decided to give the finger to it's Japanese base to pander to Western audiences. A company that simply refuses to change for the better and go back to what made them great. 

Capcom is currently under control of the tyrannical reign of the Tsujimoto family, more specifically President and COO Haruhito Tsujimoto (pictured above), and his father, Kenzo Tsujimoto, the Chairman and CEO of Capcom. The Tsujimotos are among the last remaining remnants of the Japanese video game industry's original families. 

Though the company once started out well under their reign, they've fallen under hard times once they entered the start of the HD era in the 7th generation of gaming. Many of their older franchises simply disappeared from the gaming landscape. And the notable franchises that they still use today, such as Street Fighter, and Resident Evil, have been terribly mismanaged. Sure, there have been some good games to come out of the Resident Evil franchise recently, but they aren't as good as the games of years' past, and there have been complaints about the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3 not correctly following it's original source material. 

But where did it all go wrong? How did one of the premier companies in Japanese gaming become such a joke? 

For this, we must examine what exactly caused the downfall of Capcom.

If you are familiar with TV terminology, there is a term called "Jumping the Shark." It's a term used to describe when a movie or TV franchise begins it's downward spiral into cancellation. The term was named for the late 1970s hit TV show called Happy Days, where the character Fonzie jumps over a shark on water skis, which is the moment which marked the show's sharp decline in quality:

This term can also be applied to the video game industry as well. Some moments are easy to identify, such as:

• Square's blockbuster film, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within bombing at the box office.
• EA with the John Riccitiello saga.
• Bernie Stolar becoming President of Sega of America.
• Koei Tecmo gutting the fanservice in Dead or Alive 6.

For Capcom, it had nothing to do with Mega Man Legends 3 being cancelled. It also had nothing to do with Keiji Inafune resigning from the company. To find out exactly when Capcom had their "Jumping the Shark" moment, we have to go back to the mid 2000s. This was when Capcom was still in their prime, and still had one of the major figures that helped launch them into fame. 

You may have heard of him before, his name is Shinji Mikami:

The creator of the Resident Evil franchise, and one of the greatest developers in video game history. During the early 2000s, Mikami and the Tsujimotos were at odds with each other regarding which consoles to develop new games for. Though the Tsujimotos favored the PS2 because of it's high install base, Mikami was more favorable towards the Nintendo GameCube, because he felt it was a much easier console to develop for than the PS2 and that the GameCube's hardware was the best for the types of games he wanted to make. 

Mikami formed an exclusivity agreement with Nintendo where the next games in the Resident Evil franchise would be exclusive to the GameCube. The GameCube got a remake of the original Resident Evil, plus a prequel in Resident Evil 0, and the highly anticipated Resident Evil 4. Both REmake and RE0 did very well on the GameCube, selling over 1 million copies each, and both were listed as Player's Choice titles for the GameCube. However, for the Tsujimotos, this wasn't enough. Though RE0 sold well, it didn't sell as well as they wanted it to, as it barely missed it's expected goal of 1.42 million copies. 

RE4 would eventually become part of the Capcom Five lineup of games, a GameCube exclusive-lineup of games which consisted of P.N.03, Viewtiful Joe, Killer7, and Dead Phoenix (which was canned). Though Viewtiful Joe sold okay on the GameCube, the same couldn't be said about Killer7 and P.N.03. It also didn't help that when Killer7 and Viewtiful Joe were ported to the PS2, they sold even worse on that console than they did on the GameCube. 

And so, the pressure was on RE4 to meet Capcom's high expectations. Mikami was totally against RE4 being ported to another system, so much so that he stated that he would "commit Harakiri" if it got ported to the PS2, which is short for saying "he would resign from Capcom." 

And Mikami's worst fears would come true. The Tsujimotos got stubborn and broke the exclusivity agreement with Nintendo for RE4, wrongly claiming that it did not fall under the exclusivity deal, and it ended up being only a 9-month timed exclusive title for the GameCube. It would be ported to the PS2 in October 2005. The PS2 version sold better than the GameCube version, but just barely. The GameCube version sold 1.6 million copies compared to a little over 2 million for the PS2. Considering the high install base of the PS2 it should have sold much more. Would the GameCube version have sold more copies had it remained exclusive? Maybe, as the Wii port of RE4 would match the sales figures of the PS2 version, but we'll never know for sure. This chain of events caused Mikami to leave Capcom and join Clover Studios.

RIGHT THERE! That is the moment when Capcom jumped the shark. And since that fateful moment, Clover Studios was eventually shuttered, Mikami left for PlatinumGames, and Capcom went on a major downward spiral that would lead them to make idiotic decisions en masse. 

Such as their idiotic DLC practices, which Capcom continuously defended despite massive fan backlash. 

Capcom also mismanaged Resident Evil 6, as the game decided to abandon it's Metroidvania and survival horror roots to appeal to fans of western shooters. And as a result, it received poor reviews from critics and fans.

The Tsujimotos also ran the company into the ground so hard that in 2013, they were flirting with Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as they only had $152 million left in their war chest. 

Not to mention that they also blamed the fans for Mega Man Legends 3 being cancelled as well. Just how fucking dense can you be? It's as if the Tsujimotos just stopped caring!

Not to mention there's the debacle with what Capcom did with the profits from Monster Hunter 4. Monster Hunter 4 ended up being a godsend for Capcom during this time of financial uncertainty, selling over 4 million copies and making Capcom tons of much needed profit. And what did Capcom do with said MH4 profits? Instead of investing them back into the 3DS market to make even more money, they invested them in a mobile game studio which didn't make them a single penny. 

And this led them into a SECOND financial crisis in 2017-2018, as Street Fighter V and Resident Evil 7 both underperformed:

And they were in such big trouble that Capcom Vancouver, the studio responsible for the Dead Rising series, had to be shut down:

It is an absolute shame as to what Capcom has become over the past 15 years, because this is not the Capcom that most of us grew up with. They never prepared for life without the people that made them what they were in the 80s, 90s, and the 2000s. Now they are a shell of what they once were.

And the sad part about this is that this fate could have been avoided. 

When Mikami left for PlatinumGames in 2007, he took some of the ex-Clover Studio staff with him:

These developers would put out major hits like the Bayonetta franchise - a spiritual successor to Capcom's Devil May Cry series, Vanquish, and MadWorld. 

Now suppose the Tsujimotos respect Mikami's wishes and don’t break the exclusivity deal with Nintendo for RE4. The developers that would eventually found PlatinumGames would have likely stayed with Clover Studio, and put out games similar to what Platinum puts out today. Instead of overpaying to develop Resident Evil 5 on the HD twins, Mikami strikes another exclusivity deal with Nintendo to make it exclusive to the Wii, and helps it retain survival horror elements from past games while taking advantage of the Wii's unique motion control scheme. And instead of making them into boring rail-shooters, Mikami stays and helps turn two Wii-exclusive Resident Evil games - The Umbrella Chronicles, and The Darkside Chronicles, into main series entries that follow the same gameplay formula as the other main series RE games. Things would have been so much better this way.

This could have been Capcom today if the Tsujimotos respected Mikami's wishes. Instead, they became greedy and stubborn to try and please their shareholders. And what you see today is the result of that one decision. 

The Tsujimotos, most especially their majority owner, Kenzo Tsujimoto, does not care for Capcom in the slightest. 

He cares more for his own winery in the U.S. than his own games company. 

Let's face it Capcom fans, you're in the same boat that Konami fans have been in for over a decade:

You are waiting for the owner to die. You are hoping that when he croaks, his offspring will either be usurped from power, or they become so consumed with greed that they sell the company and fuck off to Napa Valley to run the winery at Kenzo Estate. Even if that does happen within the next decade, there are way too many "what-ifs" in that scenario. By getting rid of Capcom, the Tsujimotos would basically escape with no damage, as whoever buys Capcom, buys their debt as well, and there's a good chance that they could get absorbed into one of the big three console makers instead of being restructured.  

All we can do is now is hope that things are better for them in the future. Capcom is one of the prime examples of why the Japanese video game industry really is so incompetent and corrupt. 

But after all this, it could be much worse. 

They could be Konami.

(My main inspiration for doing this is UrinatingTree's sports lolcow series, where he makes fun of a bunch of teams that have terrible ownership and incompetent management. Enjoy.)