Here's an interesting interview with Charles Bellfield of Capcom. He talks about a number of things, including Capcom's dissolution. Here's what it is;

Capcom, unlike most other developers, doesn't have dedicated strict boundaries between each of its development teams. We actually have one pool of development talent at Capcom and those individuals are basically assigned based on the timescales of each product we're working on, so everybody does work on a variety of content and games at Capcom... with the exception of Clover [...] it was managed by [Atsushi] Inaba-san, [Shinji] Mikami-san and [Hideki] Kamiya-san, and the three of them were essentially the individuals that made Clover, plus with the team staff they had about 80 people in total.

Our games need to at least break even and add value back to our shareholders, so it's impossible to make games that are not profitable over and over again. What actually happened is Mikami-san, Kamiya-san and Inaba-san chose to leave the company and do something else and the rest of the Clover team was just incorporated back into the rest of Capcom's development talent pool. So in fact, while three individuals left, Clover Studios as a separate entity was merged back into the rest of the Capcom teams and today, still, the talent we had, with the exception of three people, is still remaining at Capcom.

The tl;dr version: the only people from Clover who no longer work at Capcom are the big three. But the unsung heroes of the company mostly remain in the Capcom conglomerate. So if Okami 2 was announced by Capcom, we wouldn't have to worry too much.

It's sorta win-win, as this means Seeds will make the very artsy games, but Capcom will have the bunch of talented programmers that made up the bulk of Clover. What do you guys think?

Comments (1)

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

Add Comment