Resident Evil production is at record levels.
Capcom’s business is videogames, and business is good: Better, in fact, than it’s ever been. The Japanese giant published its end-year results on Wednesday, covering the financial year that ended on March 31, 2023, and this has been the best year in the venerable publisher’s history (thanks, VGC).
Capcom sold 41.7 million games over the year, a big jump from the 32.6 million it managed the year prior, and this is its new record for games sold in a single year. This in turn led to record high profit, as well as its tenth straight year of income growth, and major contributors were Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak (5.45 million units) and Resident Evil 4 (3.75 million, though bear in mind in this context that is one week’s sales).
That’s still only nine million-ish games though, and Capcom says most of the remainder is catalogue titles (i.e. games not released in this financial year) and spread across the Monster Hunter, Resident Evil, and Devil May Cry series. It says this accounts for 29.3 million game sales total, and the biggest contributors were Monster Hunter Rise (3.7 million), Resident Evil 2 (2.25 million) and Resident Evil 3 (1.95 million).
12.4 million of the sales were new titles. As well as Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak and Resident Evil 4, Capcom’s other titles over this period included a new gold edition of Resident Evil Village, Capcom Fighting Collection, and the Mega Man: Battle Network Legacy Collection. The purchases were overwhelmingly digital, accounting for just under 90% of sales.
After the results were published, Capcom’s share price unsurprisingly went through the roof and hit an all-time high of 5380 Japanese yen per share (just over $40). It’s settled down to more like 5270 JPY at the time of writing, though that’s still well above where it was last week.
Capcom is feeling bullish and says it reckons it can beat these new records in the current financial year. No doubt Resident Evil 4 will continue to contribute healthy numbers, but the big performers for this year will need to be June’s Street Fighter 6 (which Capcom has set an extremely ambitious target of 10 million sales) and Exoprimal in July.
Capcom felt like it had a bit of a wobble in the late 2000s, with some big projects emerging half-baked and its then-strategy of outsourcing IP to western studios not always meeting with success. Perhaps the emblematic title of this era was Resident Evil 6, a game where in the absence of fresh ideas Capcom packed it with so much stuff it basically topples over. The 2010s onwards, however, saw the company re-focus on its core titles: rebooting Resident Evil and beginning the remake project, the brilliant Monster Hunter World and Rise, and the eventually excellent Street Fighter V. These results show one thing: If you make high-quality games, the audience is now bigger than ever.
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