Capcom's Adam Boyes Part Two
The business development director discusses international projects, Western success and multiplatform development
Last week, Capcom's business development director Adam Boyes talked us through the perfect pitch, where developers can fly or die in the space of an hour.
Here, we talk with Boyes about Capcom's continuing plans to develop titles internationally, how well Japanese-developed titles sell in the West, and the publisher's decision to develop for as many platforms as possible.
We go over to Japan quite often and they come over every month to review the games. But it's not an approval or fail process. It's very conducive to creative juices. It's not regimented. We just did an internal review of Dark Void to Inafune-san who runs all R&D at Capcom. It's always great to have that because we're looking for feedback. And Japanese producers will present stuff to the US office in return. That's what Capcom is all about.
We'd be silly not to always utilise the talent we have in some way or another. It's so great for character development, so great for how a game feels and how it plays. We're bridging gaps. Out of the US office we're working with Milestone in Italy, we're working with a company in Scotland right now, we're working with a company in Australia, in Vancouver, all over the world. It's not just US or Japanese. With Bionic Commando Ben Judd has done a great job because Swedish work culture is totally different to the way the US operates. And Ben works in Japan so he can apply those lessons and the Japanese production design support to the game and you get this great amalgamation. If we can strengthen those bonds we're going to have a bigger advantage than most people on the planet as far as publishers go.
One of the reasons we set up Capcom USA and have third-party development based out of there is because we really understand Western development methodologies. Capcom Japan starts with mechanics first and in the West developers want to start with building the world first. We're trying to adopt the Japanese philosophies and apply those to the developers that we do work with, and at the end we should get a great result. Plunder is a perfect example of that – the downloadable game we're doing with Certain Affinity – the quality levels are so high but we're giving it a bit more time just to tweak it up and have it more accessible. But the game has been playable from day one. Having a playable build every single day so people can pick it up, get passionate about it and they can give immediate feedback. Having that iterative loop really close and tight it critical to development.
Some of them do a great job but we're not really looking at what other people are doing. We have the ability to be very agile in what we're doing and thinking outside of the box. We're pushing new technologies and utilising new delivery methods – even with digital downloads we're the first company to go cross platform. We're not looking at other Japanese publishers...
Right, right. Crossing that barrier, building that bridge between the different divisions is absolutely critical to success. We've seen companies that haven't been able to do that and they've wasted away.
We're adding PC to our downloadable games now. Plunder is coming to PlayStation Network, Xbox Live and PC. For us it's about getting it to as many people as humanly possible. In an ideal world all the back ends would talk to each other so people could compete together and play together. Simply having a different platform segments the market for multiplayer. There are a lot of exciting things going on – I love what Sony is doing with Home right now. Xbox 360s online experience has had so much time to become accessible. With PC we're going across to all the different digital distribution and delivery companies and so again it's about reaching as many people as possible. When you choose one partner it segments the marketplace for us.
We haven't announced any Home integration yet. We're always looking at whatever is happening whenever there's new stuff, like Microsoft with XNA. But really I think the core goals that we have are to be able to deliver as much content to the user as we possibly can. And create a community around all of these products.
Yes. Street Fighter HD Remix is falling a bit behind but we're not going to release it until it's fantastic. It has to be great and you have to let things peculate if they're not. That's one of our strengths as a company, we make great games and we won't screw it up. Publishers say they won't release until its ready, and then the game comes out and it scores 60 per cent. There are companies that say it and there are companies that do it. We do it. All publishers are going to say that but they're not actually doing it.
Adam Boyes is business development director for Capcom USA. Interview by Matt Martin.