Capcom president blames PS5 for poor sales of Monster Hunter Wilds
Haruhiro Tsujimoto wants to increase the reach of his games.
In an interview with the gaming section of the Nikkei newspaper, Capcom president Haruhiro Tsujimoto discussed the current situation at the company and in the industry itself, with Monster Hunter Wilds being one of the main sources of internal concern on several fronts.
A higher barrier than expected
On the one hand, domestically, sales are not at the same level as other installments in the series, and Tsujimoto believes there is an external factor that explains this: “The console costs about ¥80,000 ($538). When you factor in the cost of software and monthly subscriptions, it comes to about ¥100,000 ($672) at the time of purchase. This is not an amount that can be easily reached, especially for younger generations. This situation is not limited to Japan, but is similar overseas as well.”
The answer to this problem is not easy, although in Tsujimoto’s words, it all comes down to getting Monster Hunter Wilds to “the widest possible audience.” But in this regard, perhaps the studio has put itself between a rock and a hard place on a technical level. The PC version would be a good vehicle for reaching a larger audience in Japan (ruling out Xbox, which is irrelevant there), but the performance of the conversion to compatible is being heavily questioned, which scares off new players. The community that already has it on PC has been calling for urgent measures for months and hammering the game in user reviews (it has a mixed overall rating on Steam, with a “mostly negative” rating in recent times). And that’s a shame, because Capcom has been doing very good PC conversions in recent years.
The Nintendo route
On the other hand, the obvious choice would be Switch 2, which is off to an impressive start in Japan and is the clear destination for a franchise that has particularly shone on Nintendo consoles. But seeing how difficult it is for the studio to get the game to perform acceptably on mid-range PCs, the jump to Switch 2 hardware seems problematic, at least as far as Wilds is concerned as it stands right now.
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It will be interesting to see how Capcom gets out of this predicament, and whether Wilds’ problems have anything to do with reaching the natural limitations of the RE Engine that has brought so much joy to the Osaka-based company. Resident Evil 9 will be a real test in this regard.
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