Capcom profits drop hard

Right now Nintendo’s stealing most of the headlines with profit woes, but there’s another big dog out in Japan seeing all things monetary dip, dip, dip.

Capcom is reporting a 73 percent drop in profit in the past year. It’s not that hard to explain when you look at their pathetic lineup in recent months.

It hurts to say it as a Capcom fan but when you release shit games like Bionic Commando (retail version, of course), Dark Void and yet another Resident Evil on-rails game like Darkside Chronicles, well, the writing is all over the wall.

I’m no market guru, but I have to imagine things are picking up. Super Street Fighter IV is raking in some serious loot (deservedly so), Lost Planet 2 should do well enough at retail, and quite a few folks are hyped for Dead Rising 2.

After going on a bit of a shitfest, it’s nice to see one of my favorite developers get back on track with quality games that, with any luck, will be a hit at retail.

Source

Nippon Ichi operating profits plummet, Prinny is not happy

There’s bad and then there’s Nippon Ichi “our profits are down 97.5 percent” bad. They’ve had a rough year and poor Prinny couldn’t save them from this brutal beating.

Maybe I should’ve picked up that copy of Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero if only to give the studio a dollar or two.

I’m not overly familiar with the studio outside of Prinny and Disgaea so I’m probably not the best source for remedying the problem. What I would suggest to them is to, uh, do something about it. Destructoid seems to think it’s a case of too many sequels and a Japanese audience that’s grown tired of the same offerings – yeah, we’ll go with that.

Rough times area head, but dood, they can probably pull out of it.

[Update] Iwata not pleased with Wii in 2009, Nintendo reports big dip in profits

Update: It appears Andriasang mistranslated Iwata and his words aren’t quite so harsh. Originally, the quote read “We failed with the Wii” when the translation should have read “Wii has stalled.

“Wii has stalled. We were unable to continually release strong software, and let the nice mood cool,” Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said.

Strong words for a company that’s dominated hardware sales for the current generation, but there’s truth in them. Nintendo has rode the success of the Wii for all its worth, and starting from around the midpoint of last year, they did so without a significant amount of compelling software.

Since the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, there hasn’t been what most people would call a triple A (hate that term, but it has its place) release from the studio on Wii. That’s not to downplay the excellent Punch-Out!! or make little of the underappreciated Excitebots, but those aren’t system sellers and actually, they were created by third party developers for Nintendo.

Wii sales are reflecting that, and Iwata knows it. READ MORE