#capcom vancouver

It’s never a good look to make fun of people who are losing their jobs.

Dead Rising was a weird thing. There were those at Capcom who thought it had the potential to surpass Resident Evil as one of the company’s most popular franchises. But that was said during the development of Dead Rising 1, and not what came after.

The problem with Dead Rising is that a lot of it was predicated on concepts that were obtuse and a little frustrating. Not having an autosave, spacing out save locations, and basing significant portions of the gameplay on escort missions, and having hard time limits on what you could do and when were seen as things that were frustrating. And to be fair, they kind of were!

Probably because they were supposed to be! Dead Rising put you in the unenviable position of shepherding a bunch of morons through an increasingly hostile environment on a very strict deadline. That’s not supposed to be easy.

But we live in the era of the power fantasy. Where you’re a space marine ripping martian demons in half like they were made of paper.

Dead Rising made you feel weak, because you are weak. There’s value in having that experience, but you’ll never get anyone to actually say that. Even when there can actually be a great deal of unintentional hilarity in that concept, something Dead Rising tried really hard to lean in to, with its over-the-top presentation and “Japan’s parody of America’s parody of the horror of Consumer Culture” story.

(Which, as of later Dead Rising games, was more like “Canada’s parody of Japan’s parody of America’s parody of the horror of Consumer Culture”)

I can’t imagine it was easy for Capcom Vancouver to figure out what to do with something like that. There were a lot of loud complaints from people who didn’t like to be frustrated, and the customer is always right, right?

But sometimes the customer doesn’t know what they want. Sometimes, if the customer gets exactly what they want, it can be harmful without them even realizing. If you made a point to ask someone about exactly what they want, would you have gotten a game like Tetris? Or Katamari Damacy?

Capcom Expects Record loss Of 4.5 Billion Yen Due To Terminated Projects

In recent news, it looks like Capcom expects to record losses of approximately 4.5 billion yen due to the act of terminating untitled projects that were in development at Capcom Vancouver. This information was disclosed on September 18th, 2018 on Capcom’s fiscal year 2018 press release. (more…)