But the company also began to look outward in important ways: first and foremost, by courting a genuinely global audience, exemplified by 2018’s creature-slaying online epic Monster Hunter: World. Up to that point, each Monster Hunter game had typically sold a few million copies, almost exclusively in Japan. World blasted past those figures, going on to sell more than 10 million copies worldwide in its first eight months. Capcom also looked outward by paying attention to PC, which could deliver visual parity with consoles thanks, in part, to the new RE Engine. Here, Capcom was a trailblazer, courting PC players long before any of its console-focused rivals did. In 2013, DmC: Devil May Cry was released on PC just a week after consoles. Four years later, Resident Evil 7 launched simultaneously on all major platforms. Now, a little more than 60 percent of Capcom’s overall sales are on PC.

There’s a chance this may be a perception generated through savvy marketing: that Capcom announces a title only once it is confident that it can hit a release window. However, there is one game whose creation seemingly did not go entirely to plan and whose production perhaps lacked a little “discipline”: Pragmata

The broader point is that directorial vision remains crucial to Capcom’s output, even though company president Haruhiro Tsujimoto outlined a pivot to what he described as a “team-based approach” to game development in an interview earlier this year. “In the game industry, when a title becomes a series, it often ends up depending heavily on a particular developer, becoming what you’d call an individual-driven title,” Tsujimoto explained. “If that person doesn’t make one, there’s no next installment. The direction of the series becomes tied to the ideas of a single creator.”

“Capcom has a knack for finding the sweet spot where things just feel right,” says Borger.

More than four decades into Capcom’s history, it’s clear that many individuals at the company, including Onimusha director Nihei, take seriously not just its action-game heritage but all aspects of its legacy. The developers of Resident Evil Requiem were naturally “conscious,” says Kawata, of the fact that the game would be released less than a month before the 30th anniversary of the franchise. This explains its victory-lap feel: the return of Leon, the return to Raccoon City, the marriage of action-horror and survival-horror elements—all of which Kawata describes as Capcom “taking the opportunity to incorporate elements that would delight fans of the series.”

Philosophically, the company’s thinking seems progressive rather than reactive. Capcom is playing the long game rather than chasing short-term bumps in quarterly profits. “It’s not simply ‘We need five more artists, so let’s go hire five more artists,’” continues the former Capcom employee. “It’s more ‘How do we use and leverage the resources that are available to us? How do we use externalities that can support us?’ Capcom has done a really good job of balancing that out.” In every sense, from Capcom’s back catalog to its labor force and proprietary technology, the approach appears consistent. “You’re taking your strengths, repurposing them, and presenting them in a new way,” they say

There’s another critical cultural difference between how Capcom and companies in the U.S. and Europe operate. “There’s an overemphasis on project management in the West in terms of Jira [project management software], burn down [the monitoring of remaining work until a project concludes], data tracking, and task management that doesn’t necessarily turn into a game,” says the former Capcom employee. It’s not that Capcom doesn’t have project management, but the producer role there is more akin to that of a movie producer. Fundamentally, “the producer has creative oversight,” they say. “Obviously, the director has the final call, but you’re working with them to say, ‘This isn’t going to resonate with players,’ or ‘That’s going to take too long,’ or ‘We don’t have the timeline or budget to do that.’ Whereas in the West, production was more born from project management and Microsoft software development. It’s looking at timelines and looking at charts.”