Capcom: Global focus helped us "out of a pit"

Capcom's head of R&D Keiji Inafune has said that the publisher's focus on creating international product helped it rise up from the bottom of the games business and claim success outside of Japan.

During the Captivate event last week, the company demoed a number of new products, the latest titles in its continued efforts to engage a global audience, including Dead Rising 2, Dark Void, Lost Planet 2 and Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles.

"Five years ago Capcom was at the very bottom of the videogame industry and it was left up to me to think about how we were going to get ourselves out of this pit," said Inafune, reports Eurogamer.net.

"At the time I realised one of the key words we had to focus on was 'globalisation' and being able to sell our games on a global scale - not just Japan - was going to be one of the things to help us out of this pit.

"And of course it's not like Capcom hasn't had any global hits in our past - we have - but there was certainly a long period where a lot of our games were not selling in key territories around the world, and so of course I realised it was very important for us to globalise - to go back and make titles that were going to sell on an international scale, in order to bring Capcom back to the top of the group."

Inafune stated that it takes more than just localisation to sell games on an international scale, and the company has had to adopt a back to basics approach and rediscover what makes Capcom titles unique.

"It's very easy to throw out words like globalisation and selling games on an international scale, but when you break it down, there's very many different languages, cultures and countries, and trying to sell a title on a worldwide basis is no easy thing.

"And so one of the things we did was we hardened our wills - we realised exactly what it was that made Capcom games special and we focused on bringing that out in a lot of different countries, a lot of different territories, and bringing it back to the basics, and something that everyone who appreciated Capcom games would appreciate, only on a larger international scale," he detailed.

Two of the company's biggest successes this year have been Resident Evil 5, which managed to sell over 1.5 million units in the US alone last March, and Street Fighter IV, which by February had already shipped 2 million copies.

Inafune said Capcom intends to chase this success on an international scale, as the publisher continues to learn more about Western markets.

"We're not going to rest on our laurels. We don't think that just because we've made it to the top for a couple of months that that ultimately means we now truly understand what it is to sell and market games on a global scale.

"It's going to have to be an ongoing process and we're going to have to work at it in order to get it out to the maximum number of gamers," he concluded.

Keiji Inafune will be among the keynote speakers at this year's Nordic Game event, taking place on May 19-20.