The Japanese publisher said in late 2021 that it wanted PC to be its primary platform, and now it is.
Historically, Capcom has not been what you’d call a particularly PC-focused game publisher. The list of best-selling games on Capcom’s “Platinum Titles” page, for instance, includes many non-PC releases. But the company said in October 2021 that it wanted to make PC its primary platform in the future, a strategy that included having 50% of its sales on PC by 2022 or 2023—and good job, everyone, because according to Capcom’s most recent financial results, it’s mission accomplished.
The PC percentage increase was revealed in a Q&A summary following Capcom’s second-quarter results: Asked about the ratio of PC sales to total unit sales at the end of the quarter, the company replied, “Approximately 50%, with primarily catalog title sales growing.” Catalog titles are previously-released games that are continuing to sell—the stuff that gets Phil Spencer excited about the Activision purchase, basically.
Capcom revealed in its Q2 report that its sales and profit in the first half of the fiscal year actually saw a “comparative downturn” because it didn’t have a major new release to compete with Resident Evil Village, the survival horror game with the big lady that made a splash in the first half of the previous year. At the same time, the first half “showed steady progress to full-year plan,” and Capcom actually increased its full-year sales volume guidance due to a growth in catalog game sales—the continued sales of Capcom’s older games, in other words.
Catalog unit sales reached just under 11 million in the first half of Capcom’s 2020 fiscal year, accounting for 79.3% of the company’s total sales. That number increased to 13.2 million in the first half of FY21, but the percentage dropped to 66.7% thanks to the success of Resident Evil Village, a new release. In the first half of this year, catalog unit sales climbed again, to 16.1 million, and the percentage of total sales bounced back as well, to 75.4%—not quite as high as it was in 2020 thanks to a comparative increase in new unit sales over that year as well.
It’s also notable that digital sales jumped to 91.5% of the total in the first half of this fiscal year, compared to just 70.2% of sales over the same period last year. This presumably reflects the increase in purchases of older games through digital platforms (which is the most common way of purchasing any kind of game on PC anyway) and could shift in subsequent years new games come out—which could in turn reduce the PC’s total share of sales. But Capcom doesn’t seem to think that’s likely: It projected that digital sales will hold roughly steady in the next fiscal year at 90% of the total, another sign that it expects PC sales to remain strong.
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