Charles Bellfield is the Vice President of Marketing at Capcom, he was interviewed by Gamasutra about how the developer listens to gamer feedback and more. The most interesting bit was when he explains the closing of Clover Studios, which made non-mass-market games. He answers how damaging the closing was to Capcom’s image among gamers and in the process mentions most of the development team went on to work on Resident Evil 5 and a new Wii game!
To quote: “I think there are two things about that. One thing is the perception of the announcement created in the consumer marketplace and secondly, more important, is the reality of what actually happened…
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, where we did create a separate entity which was based on one of the sixteen floors in Osaka, where the other fifteen floors had everybody else on it. That Clover team was a separate identity – 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.
Some of the team that worked on Clover titles are now helping Takeuchi-san on Resident Evil 5, helping Inafune-san on a new title for the Wii, so I think it’s very much the skill set still stays in the company when those individuals stay and, unfortunately, three individuals chose to leave [and together form Seeds].”
Capcom will be making announcements in the coming months as to what their new different multiplatform titles are.