Gamers may have noticed that Capcom doesn’t release a major title like Resident Evil 4 and then immediately release Resident Evil 5. Instead, they release plenty of spin off games between major numbered titles that change up the gameplay with on rail shooting, squad based shooting, and more. If you are curious why Capcom doesn’t just release the major numbered titles, keep reading to find out.
Resident Evil producer Masachika Kawata sat down with Gamasutra to talk about their upcoming games Operation Raccoon City and Revelations. During the interview, Kawata revealed that the goal of Capcom’s strategy of diversifying the Resident Evil series is to prevent the franchise from getting stale. If Capcom released games that only focused on survival horror then “people would be really sick of Resident Evil.” Kawata went on to describe Capcom’s rationale,
At the core, basically, we want to make the best use of our brand. Resident Evil is an IP, and a franchise, that people have loved for a long time. It’s still very, very popular and we’re very, very happy about that, and we want to basically answer all the requests that we get about the series. People want to see a lot of different experiences within the Resident Evil universe, and so we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to answer those requests with a lot of different experiences, in different forms, in games.
When Kawata was asked if he was afraid the series would be diluted by so many Resident Evil games, he replied:
I’m not too concerned about that, for the simple reason that all these different Resident Evil games that are coming out are focused on very different things.
A little later in the interview, Kawata continued his explanation of how their strategy improves the franchise.
But in my mind, we’ve got this online shooter game, we’ve got other things like Mercenaries that are even more action-focused, and some other games. And by going in a lot of different directions, I’m pretty confident that people are going to still be enjoying Resident Evil for a long time.
Let us know what you think of this strategy in the comments below, and if you believe other franchises should adopt this model.
