Capcom has been talking about new intellectual property, explaining that nothing is more difficult in this industry than getting a brand new game series started.
"There is nothing more difficult in this business than launching new IP," explains Christian Svensson. "Capcom is fortunate, and I think has a better track record than most - we do very few licensed properties. Look across our history, and our portfolio of products, and they are all things that we own and control. Resident Evil, Street Fighter, Devil May Cry, Lost Planet, Dead Rising, Okami, Megaman: these are all iconic brands.
"And I would look at Okami, Dead Rising and Lost Planet as three of this generation's(ish) successful new launches. We brought back Street Fighter to be relevant again, after a nine or ten-year hiatus of re-releases and rehashes. These are really hard things to do."
It's a shame that new IP struggles these days, but publishers could perhaps stand to break the vicious cycle. Consumers don't know about a new game, so the publisher doesn't feel like marketing it properly, so consumers keep not knowing, and publishers keep not marketing. If you gave Okami the same marketing budget Capcom gives Resident Evil, I bet it would have sold quite well. Often, all it takes is simply telling customers a game is huge in order to make it huge.
Just look at Halo.
Contest:
2:20 PM on 11.23.2009
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I agree: likewise, Godhand also contributed to the death of Clover, but was an awesome game. Then they thought remaking Viewitful Joe like four times, and making a Smash Brothers clone was a good idea.
1. Like Jim said, if publishers want a new IP to be successful they have to put some effort into promoting it. It drives me nuts that something like Valkyria Chronicles was barely marketed and I didn't see it in a single retail store here in the UK. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if they don't push a game because it's a new IP and they don't think it will sell.
2. Clover closed largely because Hideki Kamiya and Shinji Mikami left Capcom. And if anything was the final nail in the coffin it was God Hand (which I've sadly still not played).
3. @ silvain: "Massive long tail, but I'm glad Okami finally passed 400k sales (mostly from the wii version). "
The PS2 version Okami had sold about 200,000 units in North America by the end of 2006, which obviously doesn't include sales elsewhere or from 2007 onwards: http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-games-people-buy-2007?page=0,5 So I would love to know where you got the idea that it broke 400,000 units mostly because of the Wii version.
Activision, EA and Ubisoft have a long track of licensed games, but none of them have given a better image to the company. At least Ubisoft and EA are somewhat trying.
That being said, I think perhaps they were stretching a bit if they really think Dead Rising is an 'iconic' brand. More like 'iconically ripping off existing zombie plots.' The whole thing could have just been a Resident Evil easter egg minigame.
That's the exact reason why it floundered.
And of course it's difficult to release a new, good IP. If releasing a top notch new IP was easy, it'd be done more often than it is now.
But your 110% right Jim, sometimes all it takes for a game to become big is for the game to be talked about as if its big. Halo's a good example but there's plenty of other games that got hype and even failed to produce after words, like Prototype. They got their word out and the game itself didn't see it through.