Capcom to give titles more dev time, says Street Fighter V ‘needed more polish’

Street Fighter V’s launch wobbles have led to a change in development strategy at Capcom.

Chairman and CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto has told investors that part of the reason why the company has forecast a dip in operating income is that it’s best to spend a little more time in developing and running a high-quality title that will perform well globally”.

Specifically, this is due to what what we learned from the past year of operations” and the launch of Street Fighter V.

Some aspects of Street Fighter V needed more polish, such as the lack of content and server issues at launch,” Tsujimoto added. Accordingly, we feel it’s better to give a little more time to development than before, and have made slight adjustments to our portfolio.

Profits may take one or two years longer to stack up than initially expected, however we will be firmly strengthening our brands. That being said, even looking at Capcom’s growth exclusively, we expect at the very least growth in excess of ten per cent to continue.”

The game was plagued by severe connection problems at the time of launch, although it was the backlash about the lack of launch content in the game that caused more problems. Series boss Yoshinori Ono admitted that the company underestimated the importance of a strong single player mode – hence the decision to launch without one.

Street Fighter V has since February sold 1.4m copies worldwide. Capcom had estimated 2m unit sales by this point.