PC has become an increasingly valuable platform for Capcom, and the company doesn’t intend to let that fact fall to the wayside in Capcom’s digital strategy.
It’s a sentiment picked up from a translation of COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto’s letter to shareholders released online this month, and one that shows the years-long shift in opinion Capcom has had toward the viability of PC games.
The full letter can be found on Capcom’s investor relations site, but the PC-centric bit (translated via Google Translate) is as follows: “Also, from the viewpoint of promoting digital strategy, expansion of PC platform spread cannot be overlooked. The sales ratio of the PC version in our main title has been improved every year, and we will strive to further expand sales as an important platform.”
Capcom, throughout the years, has a somewhat complicated relationship with PC as a game platform, making Tsujimoto’s comments a far cry from many of its earlier opinions. For instance, the company originally opted to keep Super Street Fighter IV away from PC for fear of piracy’s prevalence on the platform. Shortly after, Capcom’s then-SVP Christian Svensson affirmed that the company was pushing for a bigger presence on PC, though mostly in the West as Japan’s own PC scene was still growing.
More recently, however, the company has been warming up to the expanded audience PC releases open its games up to. Monster Hunter World is an excellent example of this. The game released for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 back in early 2018, and came to PC during the latter part of that same year. It just recently surpassed 11 million lifetime sales, a feat the company said was thanks in no small part to it finding a solid audience on PC. While Monster Hunter World has been a noticeable powerhouse in Capcom’s financial reporting since it released, a combination of its staying power on consoles and new audience on PC keeps the game going strong.