More great news for PC gaming, and this time it’s coming from Capcom.
After decades of focusing mainly on arcades and consoles, Capcom’s focus is about to shift to PC gaming as it aims to reach 50% of sales on PC and 50% of sales on console by 2022 or 2023.
Capcom’s Chief Operations OfficerHaruhiro Tsujimoto, in an interview with Nikkei, has confirmed that Capcom’s new primary focus will be the PC and PC gamers. This is excellent yet unsurprising news considering Capcom’s sales performance of their most popular games, especially when those games are available for PC as well.
Although no official figures were cited, it is generally believed that the PC sales of Resident Evil Village constituted a rather significant amount of their 4.5 million sales since the game’s launch. By certain estimates, the total share of the game's sales could be up to 40% for PC. Even considering some of their more recent games that have made it to PC, this seems to imply thatPC gamers are just as eager to play Capcom’s games as console players. After all, many of us grew up on Capcom games.
| Title | Release Date | Platforms | Sales (US$ millions) |
| Monster Hunter World | January 2018 | PS4, Xbox One, PC | 17.3 |
| Resident Evil VII: Biohazard | January 2017 | PS4, Xbox One, PC | 9.8 |
| Resident Evil 2 Remake | January 2019 | PS4, Xbox One, PC | 8.6 |
| Monster Hunter World: Iceborne | September 2019 | PS4, Xbox One, PC | 8.2 |
| Resident Evil 5 | March 2009 | PS3, Xbox 360 | 7.9 |
| Resident Evil 6 | October 2015 | PS3, Xbox 360 | 7.9 |
| Monster Hunter Rise | March 2021 | Switch | 7.3 |
| Street Fighter II | June 1992 | SNES | 6.3 |
| Street Fighter V | February 2016 | PS4, PC | 5.8 |
| Resident Evil 2 | January 1998 | PSOne | 4.96 |
(Courtesy of Wikipedia)
This isn’t to say that Capcom has previously completely neglected PC players, as it has supported many conversions of its games on PC. However, Capcom’s games that came to PC from consoles (with some notable exceptions such as Resident Evil: Village and Devil May Cry 5)can take months to come to the PC, and that’s if they are officially released on the PC. Some of Capcom’s games that have been ported to PC have left much to be desired.
The announcement came soon after Capcom confirmed that Monster Hunter Rise is finally coming to the PC on January 12th, 2022.
In its 2020 Integrated Report, Capcom had already outlined the plans to re-adjust and re-focus its strategy regarding PC and console gaming and the regions where it was historically sold.
In addition to shifting their major focus to PC, Capcom is also planning on making its games more widely available and focusing on their original IPs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Capcom saw a rather odd year. Its arcade division lost significantly whilst it’s video game division made up for it and even brought in a bit extra.
Capcom’s decisions might seem a bit slow and out of date, but considering the Capcom’s history and their main player base it’s not very surprising. From their Integrated Report, it was clear that Capcom’s decision to try to dominate the market digitally came as a response to what they’ve deemed as a spread of PC as a game platform, and the standardization of selling software digitally and over the internet. We can’t really blame Capcom for waiting to jump on a train, especially with the recent Epic vs Apple lawsuit, the previous gambling and microtransaction problems EA subjected gamers to, as well as other issues that tech companies and gaming studios have been trying to iron out in the wake of digitalization of gaming.
With all this in mind, it is thus unsurprising that Capcom had made the decision to focus on PC gaming now, as they’re hoping to dominate digital markets in the future (raising sales 80%-90%), and as they’ve put it, to be delivering the best content “From Osaka to the world”.
