Capcom slowing down on digital updates of old fighters
Publisher seeing a "dropoff" in sales of further re-releases
Despite a number digital re-releases of old fighting games like Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition and Darkstalker Resurrection, publisher Capcom has decided to "slow down" on further conversions. Capcom senior vice president Christian Svensson explained the reasoning in a post on the Capcom Unity community forums.
"I think we've probably run the course of feasible titles here given the dropoff we've seen in sales with each new introduction. It seems the novelty of such projects is wearing off even within just the fighting game community based upon the sales data of our last two launches," wrote Svensson.
For straight re-releases of PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable titles on the PlayStation Network, Svensson noted the difficulty in obtaining the rights and licenses for those titles.
"We must have digital distribution rights in the original agreements with middleware, voice actors, musical score, etc. There must be an existing license in force in the case of something that uses non-Capcom IP (e.g. SNK, Marvel, Xmen) and also no legacy IP issues. At times in the past, teams have infringed upon other third-party IP and new IP sweeps must be conducted to ensure that this is not the case in a given version," he explained. "Sony has to verify that the title in question works in their emulators. Once all three points are met, Sony takes control and it is up to them when and how it releases."
Finally, for digital releases of current disc-based titles like Super Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter x Tekken, Svensson said that releasing them on Xbox Live would be "easy", but it would be "more difficult" on PlayStation 3.
"However it's being done as a matter of the planned development on all forthcoming titles," he said. "So in short, what we can bring to you in these forms, we are doing so. That doesn't mean everything will show up and to set expectations, I think you should prepare yourself that not every fighting game we've made will receive even one of these treatments."