The out-of-touch corporate suit is a popular trope gamers like to imagine: business types who know how to make money but seemingly don't engage in the medium more than is strictly required. While that archetype can and does exist, executives generally know what they are doing. But for our money, the best questions and takes often come from investors who just want to see a return on their stake, as shown recently during an illuminating Q&A session at Capcom.
GamesRadar+ reviewed the list of questions that Capcom fielded; some of it is pretty incredible. The company was asked why it doesn't simply move the release date of Monster Hunter Wilds up from its 2025 window to December 2024, which would allow Capcom to "capture more profit" from the Holiday season. With what we imagine was infinite patience, the firm explained that the release would be revealed "once preparations are complete."
Another stated that Capcom had announced Monster Hunter Wilds for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, "but not for portable platforms like Nintendo Switch. Will this game be limited to these non-portable consoles?" Again, we like to think that the respondent let out a long-suffering sigh before replying:
"One concept we’ve incorporated into this title is aiming to portray the maximum of the world of Monster Hunter by utilizing the latest technology to its limit. To that end, the platforms capable of realizing that concept are currently the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC."
In no particular order, the company was also asked why the subtitles for the shareholder presentation were so poor, whether a video record of the meeting would be made available for later viewing, and for background on how the firm became the official sponsor of the Japan Volleyball Association.
These are the pressures that the board of a company like Capcom must manage, with investors asking the hard questions. Do you think Monster Hunter Wilds could be made ready in time for Christmas? Let us know in the comments section below.
[source capcom.co.jp, via gamesradar.com]
Comments 32
I know this is a PlayStation site and whatnot, but I really hope Wilds ends up on the Switch successor. That'd be a day 1 for me.
Honestly I know MH World saw stupid success on only home consoles, but I think when they consider how great the success of Rise as well and how much further reaching the MH IP is with it being on Switch, and when thinking of wanting to have constant growth for a publicly traded company, asking if MH Wilds is only going to be on non-portable systems honestly isn't a bad question loll
My ASUS ROG Ally has too many caps and a bone to pick with anyone claiming a PC cannot be a portable console.
I don't think it's that outlandish a question considering Monster Hunter been very successful on Nintendo platforms and people are going to want to play the series on the Switch's successor.
@RoomWithaMoose Uhhh.... that would certainly be a terrible move if we remember what happened with Mortal Kombat 1 and Arkham Knight. Unless a Switch 2 is announced (Which almost seems to be confirmed at this point) it would be a disastrous launch. Just play it on the Steamdeck.
Super Switch 2 will get a Monster Hunter game. If it’s Wilds it will probably be in the announce trailer, but if not, well there will still be a Monster Hunter game on the new console. Maybe a Worlds port to start.
Switch 2 won’t be nearly as powerful as PS5 but it should be close enough to Series S that Nintendo should send a thank you card to MS for making it and forcing companies to support it. 👍
@Gamer83 Hey congrats on the 15 years of commenting on here, nearing 10,000, nice.👍 Crazy right. 😱
Hardcore fans like how the game looks, for me it looks like something I want to buy and play but it does look dated and the reason for that is the imminent switch 2 release, so those suit guys shouldn't be too worried
@RoomWithaMoose that's up to Nintendo, not Capcom
If it's coming to switch 2 they literally can't say anything since Nintendo hasn't announced the console existing. Shareholders aren't the smartest. That's also if Nintendo makes a strong enough console. Capcom would much rather pull a monster hunter rise... which honestly, I wouldn't be upset about.
@Gamer83 Agreed. Definitely a legit question, especially from an investor standpoint. Not so “out-of-touch” to me.
This is both sad and funny at the same time.
Reminds me of the Nintendo investor meeting "can we make people pay more for Mario to jump higher"
@Cutmastavictory
Actually Rise was significantly less successful than world selling 14.7M vs 25.3M. Even though Rise is now available on every platform and world is not on the switch.
The problem for Rise that being a Switch title meant that people perceived it as an inferior or lower end product and sales on other platforms suffered. On Steam Rise sold about 1/3rd of what World did(and PC gamers are likely to be the more open minded of it being a “Switch game”)Rise was very successful in Japan but outside of Japan it sold closer to about 40% of what world did. The PS and Xbox ports did basically non-existent numbers.
So Capcom might plan on porting to the Switch successor later but they might not want to make that known right away and avoid any perception of it being a lower quality product in order to target weaker hardware.
It’s possible they will need to keep making 2 different games to fully capture both markets, the handheld market in Japan that has always been the dominant way to play MH since the PSP games, and then the premium home console/PC game market.
"Do you think Monster Hunter Wilds could be made ready in time for Christmas?"
It could add to the ever increasing % of games that had potential, being launched in an unfinished state, with awful performance and game breaking issues etc which is killing pre-ordering of games!
I'm pretty confident that MH Wilds is going to be released on Switch 2. Perhaps even a launch game or launch window game. The series has been very popular on handheld platforms, so it makes a lot of sense.
@rjejr
Time sure does fly, especially as you get older. I remember visiting this group of websites way back in 2006 when Nintendo Life was called vc-reviews.com. 🤣
@ChrisDeku That depends how you measure that success.
Here we have Rise just shy of 15m on one platform, then on PC a year later, then other consoles long after that. World has been on sale for twice as long, across three platforms since the start, and hit 25m.
So in raw numbers, yes World was a bigger success. But if you say "sales were non existent on Xbox and PS4" then surely Rise as a set of staggered releases over half the time selling over half as much mainly from only two platforms is a greater success?
The investors asked Capcom to pushed for holiday released for MH Wild just showed some investors are quite clueless when comes to how video games development works. All they think is profit.
And this type of investors are one of the reason why many games especially AAA games released in unfinished / unpolished state. Just like some gamers who keeps asking and pushing publishers / devs to show their working projects despite it's not ready to show.
The game is going to make so much money. All they have to do is sit back and wait.
People saying "asking about Wilds not being on Switch" is not out of touch. It is as out of touch as you can get, if investor bothered to watch 5 seconds of the trailer he'd know this will never work on Switch!
I don't think those questions are anywhere near as stupid as the questions some 'journalists' on other websites make in regards decisions made by developers when designing games' characters' and bringing their stupid politics into it.
@Haruki_NLI It wasn't on PC since the start, so 2 platforms, and since one of them was Xbox One, you could basically say 1 platform as well.
Investors - both of the institutional and speculator varieties - are complete and utter morons with no knowledge of how anything really works in the industry and are the fundamental cause of pretty much every gross practice going on today. They know ROIs, market caps, and share prices, but they generally have close to zero intimate knowledge of what they are investing in beyond the standard financial stats. Bunch of idiot geese flocking from one thing to the next.
And these people call the shots. The decisions that Sony, Microsoft, etc. make are geared more towards these people than the consumers. God help us.
@Haruki_NLI Monster Hunter World also came to PC later(only 2 months different in the gap). The Xbox release also only sold a very small amount too due to it being a much smaller install base concentrated mainly in NA when MH in biggest in Asia(Japan on consoles and rest of Asia on PC).
While Rise is newer its sales have slowed down to the point that World sells roughly the same or slightly more copies every quarter now since a year ago. In the last update from Capcom covering up to March 31st both Rise and World sold 500,000 copies although Worlds numbers don’t account for the Iceborne Master edition(which is base game + expansion, this is a weird quirk of Capcom counting method which they since no longer do for newer games) which accounts for about 1/5 of all World sales(and closer to 1/3 since the release of Iceborne) and Iceborne outsold sunbreak 1M to 600k.
So world not only sold more overall it continues to do better in the later stages of it’s lifetime even when the newer rise got ported and people are picking up world over it still.
The biggest indicator of the way people view Rise as inferior product outside of Japan is evident on Steam. Not only did World sell about 3 times as many copies but even now it is played by more people(right now online world is 33.5k vs Rise’s 8.7k) and its higher on the sales charts(World is 207th and Rise 432nd)
Another important thing to consider is that big games generally sell a lot better immediately after the big breakout game in a series or for a developer. For Example Cyberpunk 2077 sold much faster than The Witcher 3. Uncharted 3 sold about 300% of Uncharted 2 etc.
For Rise there was a massive breakthrough and then it sold much poorer than the previous game and it’s arguably now most important format(Steam) particularly ignored it in favour of continuing to play the older game.
Removed - flaming/arguing
@Gamer83 " vc-reviews.com "
That's funny, I started there as well, Wii was all the rage. I enjoyed it so much I asked 1 of the people who worked there, seemed like only 2 of them at the time, if they knew of a similar site that covered Playstation. And they replied, "This guy Sammy who used to work here just went off and started his own PS site called Pushsquare." so here I've been ever since. W/ you and I'd say a handful of others I recognize long term. I've tried quitting a few times, moved on to Twitter, but as long as I'm gaming there's things to learn about here. And some fun to be had. 😁
I'll hit ya up in another 5 years, see if we're still both around. 😂
Wilds won't be on switch..lol it's not that powerful..that's what's why rise is ...not so detailed
Well... monster hunter was a japanese first game. They are probably not taking it well that it isn't coming to the most popular system in the country.
Switch 2 is around the corner though, but i doubt it can run it.
@metak I apologise for my grammar. Unacceptable. The rest is an opinion and your rudeness in presenting a counter demeans you. Shame you had to make it personal, I accept criticism if done respectfully so I'm disregarding what you said.
Makes sense when you consider how Monster Hunter Rise sold on Switch. While it didn't do incredibly on other platforms (relative to World, which remains very popular on PC), it's absolutely one of the highest selling MH games on any single console platform to date.
There's a gigantic well of support for MH on Nintendo consoles, so of course investors are going to be licking their chops when they think about the 10 - 15 million extra sales a Switch version might sell.
We know Capcom convinced Nintendo to add more RAM into the Switch when it was in development, so I find it hard to believe Nintendo and Capcom aren't looking to target at least a minimum acceptable spec for running this on next-gen hybrid hardware.
@ChrisDeku I passed on Rise for a long time because after World looking and running great, I did not want to go back to 30fps at best PSP-esque MonHun.
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