Passing through Famitsu to talk about Capcom’s 40th anniversary, the COO has set an ambitious goal for the next installment in the venerable franchise. Sure of its strength thanks in particular to a much more generous content than that of a certain Street Fighter V in 2016, Street Fighter 6 aims to do better than its predecessor, which was also released on a more limited number of platforms (PS4 and PC).
« The Street Fighter series is one of our flagship titles, so we didn’t hesitate to invest in this area. In recent years, several titles in the Resident Evil series have sold 10 million copies, and the Monster Hunter series now has titles that are aiming for 20 million copies. Street Fighter V has already sold over 7 million copies. If we manage to leverage our experience in digital sales, we should be able to aim for 10 million copies with the next game. “says Haruhiro Tsujimoto. The latter must not however forget that the competition is also becoming increasingly strong commercially, in particular Tekken and Mortal Kombat whose modern opuses affect more people than the Capcom saga.
The winning transition to digital
As ambitious as this goal is, Capcom is giving itself time to achieve it. Whether Street Fighter V has surpassed 7 million copies distributed worldwide, only at the cost of 7 years of updates, additional content and promotions. As such, the dematerialization of the market is doing business well for Capcom, 80% of whose video game turnover is now digital. In addition to higher margins than with physical distribution, the dematerialized has the advantage of not depending on the shelves whose visibility weakens over time, not to mention better price control.
« Before digital releases became commonplace, most of our games were physical releases sold in stores, but due to how the shelves worked, we could only ship the number of copies that would sell out in six months. This meant that we could not continue to sell games after this period, even if we wanted to. In recent years, buying from a digital store has become more common. »
« From 2021, we have set ourselves the goal of ensuring the sale of the titles three years after their release. The reason we set a three-year period is that our standard amortization period for development is around two years, so it’s always worth selling titles from the third year onwards at a lower unit price. »
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