The video game industry has not been looking too hot. Xbox is seemingly in free fall. Sony is burning resources and pissing off fans in pursuit of a digital future. Many major publishers are experiencing more misses than hits. Each cut deeper than the last. And amid all this is one charming exception: Capcom. In a comprehensive review of their new “golden age,” journalist Lewis Gordon at The Ringer spoke to a number of current and former employees about their healthy equilibrium. One US-based former employee had some especially choice advice to Western studios: Enough with the micromanaging.
“There’s an overemphasis on project management in the West in terms of Jira,” the former Capcom employee, who opted to remain anonymous, tells Gordon, “task management that doesn’t necessarily turn into a game… “Obviously, the director has the final call, but you’re working with them to say, ‘This isn’t going to resonate with players,’ or ‘That’s going to take too long,’ or ‘We don’t have the timeline or budget to do that.’ Whereas in the West, production was more born from project management and Microsoft software development. It’s looking at timelines and looking at charts.”
Coinciding with their anticipated new entry in the Onimusha series, Gordon spoke with the likes of Satoru Nihei, Akihito Kadowaki and Masachika Kawata about Capcom’s defiant success story. Some things are obvious from afar. After a cataclysmic stretch in the early 2010s, where Kawata wanted to compete with the likes of Call of Duty, the company rebounded with a better balance of boldness and bonafides.
The overstuffed Resident Evil 6 was considered one of the worst in the series. Its immediate, claustrophobic follow up Resident Evil 7 is inversely considered one of the best. Ever since, Capcom has enjoyed a steady cycle of creatively novel new entries in classic series, including Street Fighter and Monster Hunter, and using the surplus to fund original ideas like Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess and Pragmata (which Gordon reveals was at one point eyed as a horror survival). Mix things up with interesting new hires, like Spec Ops’ Richard Pearsey. Retain experienced staff. Keep things moving along.
This would seem like obvious standard showbiz practice, the kind that made TV, music and film production thrive for like 100 years. But the world of entertainment has been overrun with more particular business philosophies. A lot of the atrophy at the likes of Xbox, and the source of these now routine waves of layoffs, is the overruling desire for immediate quarterly returns. If the numbers aren’t trending the desired way, do something drastic to smudge them. Capcom has resisted these destructive urges, and the anonymous employee seems to believe that their international competition has too many micromanagers, who look purely at productivity suites like Jira as a false gauge for progress.
Of course, plenty of poor management exists in Japan too. While stricter labor laws prevent the kinds of mass layoffs we see in the States, management in any time zone can be swayed by bad ideas. Look no further than Square Enix, who never saw a snake oil they didn’t like the taste of. But the trend of dogmatic number crunching has made many of these studios forget they are working in culture. At the end of the day, if no one finds you the least bit cool, if you burned all your talent or have no vets to train newcomers, no amount of rocket ship emojis is going to fly you to safety.