Bandai game producer Taira Nakamura recently caught the attention of industry peers – including former Ace Attorney developer Masakazu Sugimori – by raising a concern in today’s game industry: how difficult it’s become to create new IPs and nurture them beyond just their initial release.
“With development costs rising,” Nakamura writes on X, “creating a new IP is tougher than ever. Popular IPs usually grow gradually over time, as a series progresses. Pokémon and Monster Hunter didn’t become hits overnight. They’ve grown into what they are through multiple entries. That’s why you don’t often see a brand-new title suddenly selling like crazy, on the same level as these long-running franchises.”
However, with development costs skyrocketing to, as Nakamura notes, upwards of tens of millions of dollars per title, developers can still end up in the red or with little to no profit margin even if their new IP is well received. “Then that project gets labeled a ‘failure,’ and despite being a hit, it never gets a sequel and never gets a chance to grow as an IP. But IPs are something you nurture. It’s important to think of the long-term, not just the performance of the first release,” Nakamura comments.
In response, former Capcom developer Masakazu Sugimori, who created the OSTs for the first two mainline Ace Attorney games and voiced Manfred von Karma, expressed agreement, citing Ace Attorney as an example of an IP that was nurtured despite being a “failure” at first.
According to Sugimori, the series’ first game Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney did break even, but it was by no means a hit in Capcom’s eyes. It sold between 70,000 and 80,000 copies on the Game Boy Advance in its first week, whereas titles like Devil May Cry and Resident Evil were selling a million copies in their launch weeks.
“However, Takumi-san (Ace Attorney series director Shu Takumi) didn’t give up.
He kept developing the series through to the third game, and that’s when it started to take off. From there, it got a movie, a stage play, an anime… its popularity kept growing. Ace Attorney is truly an IP that Capcom nurtured,” Sugimori concludes.
