Resident Evil 7: Biohazard has failed to meet the sales expectations of publisher Capcom, the firm's latest financial report has revealed. The game – which was something of a critical darling – has sold a very respectable 3.5 million units thus far, but that's some way short of the four million units that the organisation had projected for the survival horror.
In fact, the company missed the mark with all of its major games. Monster Hunter XX, which is only available in Japan, sold 1.7 million of the two million units expected. And Dead Rising 4, a timed Xbox One exclusive, failed to even reach one million of the two million units forecast. It will be interesting to see how much effort the publisher puts into the PlayStation 4 port.
The missed projections look bad on paper, but outside of Dead Rising 4, the results seem reasonable to us. Perhaps this isn't a case of Capcom underperforming, but more its expectations being misaligned with the market – everyone knows that you're supposed to underpredict so you end up looking that much better when you exceed your lowly "expectations".
[source capcom.co.jp]
Comments 43
Well not suprise on dead rising 4 the game is hot garbage.
No mention SF V? I wonder how that met with their expectations
I used to buy maybe seven or eight new AAA titles a year. Once season passes started prominently entering into the situation, that stopped. I can't pay $90 - $100 for a complete game at this point. Not when I can wait six to nine months and get the GOTY/complete edition on sale for $30. If it's a good game at launch it'll be just as good later. Sometimes better as games get patched over time.
I understand the financial reasoning behind season passes--games have remained $60 for many years now despite inflation. Used games have put a dent into their earnings. So I do get it. I just can't support it.
RE7 looks right up my alley. I've played the demo in VR and can't wait to play the entire game that way. It'll just have to wait.
Not surprised at all by Dead Rising 4's numbers. RE 7 is very concerning. Great game that idiots totally ignore. I guess RE 8 will be back to the action bs.
I am yet to buy Resi 7 and it is on my to buy list. To me these figures don't look terrible for a console game with PC and PSVR exclusive and I think the release will win over fans to the franchise. To be honest, despite the good reviews, I wonder how Resident Evil 6 impacted the sales?
Still, I intend to pick it up soon so buck up Capcom, another £40 coming your way.
Sorry gamers but I preferred resi 5 and 6. I love the spooky tension but also like the action as I power up! Liked the idea of taking down mega bio weapon corporate umbrella instead of another 'tiny zombie experiment house romp'. I could never tire of slashing zombies with a penknife or blasting away at super villains and zombie mutants! It's the kid gamer in me!
As for monster Hunter... should had ported over to vita and PlayStations since they are a multi-console business. Hope they listen to fans and overcome this blip... keep it up capcom 😄
@Gamer83 "I guess RE 8 will be back to the action bs."
Pleassse no. PLEASSSE!
@get2sammyb what we need is a mix between the 2, Resi 7's atmosphere and Resi 4 style gameplay
Haven't got RE7 but it's definitely high up on my list.. will get it at some point before the holiday season
Monster Hunter underperforming? There's a new one. Then again, it is just an upgraded re-release of an already very recent game. A lot of people probably bought MHX and then called it a day.
Regarding Resi, I think a lot of people were put off by the first-person viewpoint, but Capcom being Capcom, they'll conclude "people don't want horror games," and go back to the action format with Resi 8. I hope not, though.
@Gamer83 People aren't idiots for ignoring it. They completely changed the gameplay by going to first person, and that combined with how bad they screwed up with RE6 has turned a lot of fans away. I have a few friends that are diehard RE fans and refuse to touch RE7 even after I tell them it's fantastic. They've just been burned by Capcom one too many times to give them anymore time or money.
I highly doubt RE8 will return to action, but i also doubt they'll be able to capture the same lightning in a bottle they achieved with RE7.
@FullbringIchigo I don't think it can be done. You sacrifice one for the other. (I liked RE7's gameplay anyway.)
I'm not suprised, game's cost more money and come with less content! I've only bought 1 AAA game this year P5 and i'm not overly excited for any AAA game's now until all the way into September.
@get2sammyb they could always go back to the Resi 2 gameplay style but with better controls of course
@xMEADx I actually don't think that's true. Once upon a time you'd pay like £80 for something as barebones as Street Fighter 2.
@xMEADx Yeah come on that's not true at all. Resi 7 is as long as any other mainline RE game and it's as good as the originals, too. Plus it has the free Not a Hero mode coming. Granted, Umbrella Chronicles has more longevity but the game sucks so I know which I'd take given the option. And the cost more money bit I don't understand at all lol.
@get2sammyb
It only makes sense though if Capcom is going for the $$$. Which, like any business, it is. We were fortunate to get one more mainline RE focused on horror and the fanbase, aside from a few of us, failed to show up. And most used tired, lame ass excuses to stay away.
I think resident evil 7 is cheaper to make compared to re 6, so maybe capcom doesn't need to sold as much as re 6 to make a profit. And remember that when one game is bad, its the next titles that will be punished with less sales (see watchdog 2).
It's dumb for companies to rely so heavily on games selling more than 1.5 million-2 million copies
That's the problem these days, most gamers like mindless action shooty games over anything else, so we'll be back to punching boulders before you know it. I say we but I won't be if they go back in that direction, Resident Evil 7 was the best I've played in the series since the psone and fantastic in VR
Still haven't bought RE7. I am waiting on a sale. They jinxed it when they said that they could sell a million on day 1, if I remember the arrogant and delusional statement correctly.
Besides, this past January was packed with great games so gamers had to choose.
RE 7 was pretty good, but massively overrated! There were a couple things they could have done to make that game so much better.
Like aiming in that game; it was so incredibly cumbersome and unrealistic. You have to be a complete and absolute idiot to ignore your iron sights when aiming a weapon! They could have even used that to increase tension as well by lowering the FOV drastically (Most inexperienced shooters tend to close one of their eyes so they don't have double vision when aiming).
RE 7 tried way too hard to be scary. I ended up laughing my way through it most of the time. Admittedly, I did jump when Jack busted through a wall like the Kool-Aid man. They should have had much more unexpected and dangerous events like that. That would have been much better than the cringy dialogue and overdone visual horror. I've seen some of that stuff in real life. In a video game or movie that will only make me chuckle.
Also there wasn't enough melee. In the demo I was pretty excited when I got the axe; it had big meaty swings and felt heafty and weighty. I enjoyed using it in the prologue area. Too bad it disappears forever and you never get anything like it again.
I honestly kind of wish I just watched a play through of the game. It was barely worth the $40 I spent on it.
@kyleforrester87 @get2sammyb maybe not with this game but it's been a trend for a while, i've never been a resi evil fan tbh I only enjoyed the first one that's the only reason I never bought this game. The money for content is the main reason i've purchased so few game's this year, even the game's that are worth the money suffer from that as well as it affect's the whole industry because it has a bad reputation now. I did a bit of looking on the internet and as far as I can tell game sale's are at a huge low point atm, just look at how many game's were sold in febuary 2016 to get the UK number one (Far Cry Primal) and compare it to febuary 2017 (Nier), it's almost a Japenese landslide folk's, so I can't be the only person that feel's like that.
@bbq_boy You make me sick but thats me. Resident Evil 6 was the only Resident Evil i could not finish. Chris Redfield was so pumped up it was ridiculous the first boss was making me sad nothing scary or intense about it. Try Resident Evil 1 the fight against Tyrant and i can not understand you would ever choose Resident Evil 6 above that. The Leon missions where kinda simple and the zombies where so badly made i missed the scary parts. And that made me sell my first Resident Evil game ever.
Resident Evil 5 was fun only the gunwielding zombies where retarded. But it should have been a spin-off game.
@get2sammyb 'Once upon a time you'd pay like £80 for something as barebones as Street Fighter 2.'
And around that time you could buy sensible world of soccer with every football league in the world included for £24.99 at release. I'm just balancing the argument. You were paying for the cartridge components, the Nintendo premium and a niche product compared to movies and music at the time.
Ok. So does anyone know out of the 3.5million what percentage was VR only? I don't remember if there was a VR version and a normal version?
Also, does this mean that the first proper AAA game for VR has failed (in their eyes). I hope not.....
@xMEADx At what point in the past did games offer better value for money, would you say?
@themcnoisy Yeah and once upon a time a can of coke was 35p and now it's 85p.. lol
@kyleforrester87 That's called inflation kyle.....
Lol. Just squaring up on ye Olde games pricing. For every super expensive cartridge game another none cartridge based system housed a game less than half the price.
To answer your question to mead, I would say the start of the previous gen x360, wii and PS3 had a great content to price ratio. Obviously later on that gen it all went to pot with season passes and what not.
@themcnoisy ah I thought you were getting at something else lol. Still, having gamed for (getting on for!) 30 years I don't think we've had it better than the current generation. Games are on the whole easier these days, no doubt, but there are exceptions. And many old games relied on tactics such as limited lives or were made more difficult through technical limitation.
@kyleforrester87 I dunno man it's been happening for year's with season pass's and microtansaction's etc. I've gamed about 30 year's as well i'm not saying that it's bad right now i'm quite enjoying myself atm, i've bought load's of older cheaper game's to keep me going like Batman AK, Deus Ex (with all the content/season pass) and Star War's which tbh is well worth buying now that you can get the game and season pass really cheap, it feel's like it should of felt on release now and i've been thoroughly enjoying it. I also plan on playing HZD, Nioh and (there's another I can't think of right now) but only when I see em cheap.
@xMEADx Fair enough, I'm not dismissing what you're saying but it could be that it's you who's changed as much as gaming has. It's funny you mention Horizon and Nioh though as I reckon those are very much games that are deserving of a full price purchase.
I will say it is harder to like gaming these days, where as back in the days of PS1 it all seemed so effortless but I put that down to growing up.
@kyleforrester87 Naa game's are like Wagonwheel's they really are smaller in a fancier packet, they just want us to think it's because we grew up.
@xMEADx The thing about it is, though, that the budgets are through the roof these days. You could make a top-tier title with a team of ten or so people in a year a little while back — now it takes 200 people teams three years, and they still have to outsource a ton of art to Asia.
There has to be a second revenue stream somewhere.
I honestly don't believe the AAA games model is sustainable for much longer, but that's a different discussion.
@xMEADx aha, maybe!
Should have listened to Mark Lilly "Aim high but take your time"
I just don't really buy Capcom games anymore.What with their on-disc DLC crap.
@Bad-MuthaAdebisi Would they have made more from those extra sales than they did off selling the DLC, though? Suppose that's the question.
@glassmusic I think you've hit the nail dead on the head there.
It's not a case of their sales forecasts being optimistic but also consumers getting wise to company tactics, fatigue of season passes, high profile cases of sub par quality first day versions.
Put all this together alongside the 2nd hand market and mid cycle hardware upgrades it's little wonder they fell short.
Even the much lauded Witcher 3 released a much cheaper goty edition with all dlc and patches. If I'd held off for that I'd have saved money and not be stuck with a couple of broken quests that I can't now bring myself to go back to.
Pay a premium price early on for an inferior product or hold off for better & cheaper is definitely the way forward.
Very respectable numbers for a damaged brand, and considering I haven't seen the game on sale, I expect the game will do well all year.
@Flaming_Kaiser I'm hardcore and casual at same time! I tried playing Resident evil 1 remastered... my first attempt at it. 30mins later I was bored out of my brains... slow pace = sleepfest. Lack of ammo = controlled game experience. Going back and forth to explore a room = game filling and monotonous. Might be good back in 1900s but I prefer modern slicker controls, fast fluid movement and don't try to hard to control my experience games. Gimme more ammo to slap those zombies down Lol!!! Let's see if they produce an action/horror hybrid for resi 8.. and see if it betters the sales. Sorry dinosaur your dodo days are numbered lol!!!
Overuse of "lol" is the sure sign you're dealing with a tool.
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