Capcom celebrated its 43-year anniversary on June 11, and to commemorate the milestone, president and COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto (who leads Capcom alongside founder Kenzo Tsujimoto) talked to Famitsu at length about the company’s beginnings and how it has made it so far as a game developer. One interesting topic that came up is Capcom’s conscious effort to shift away from individual-driven development – which heavily depends on the creative vision and expertise of a single creator – and adopt team-driven development.
Capcom’s flagship IPs, like the Monster Hunter, Resident Evil and Street Fighter series, have maintained their popularity and continued to produce hit games decades after they were originally created, and Tsujimoto considers Capcom’s organizational transformation to be one of the biggest reasons why this was possible.
“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. 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,” he explains.
Development at Capcom likewise functioned this way for a long time, but according to Tsujimoto, the company started feeling the limits of relying on auteur-driven development, especially against the backdrop of fulfilling its responsibilities to shareholders as a publicly listed company.
“We discussed the issue with the central figures behind each franchise and ultimately agreed that we should abandon that approach. What we came up with instead was the idea that every title should essentially be rebuilt from the ground up. We didn’t mind even if sales temporarily declined as a result, and by switching to a team-based approach to game development, Capcom changed dramatically.”
Tsujimoto believes this decision has more than paid off, allowing new entries in Capcom’s most valued IPs on a regular basis. This also means that knowledge and expertise accumulated by development teams is handed over generationally, securing each franchise’s longevity. Additionally, he considers this to be just as important when it comes to developing new IPs, with 2026’s Pragmata being a symbol of Capcom’s team-oriented development structure.
When it comes to auteur-driven games, names like Hideo Kojima or Yoko Taro immediately come to mind, and these types of IPs, which are practically synonymous with an individual creator, can be extremely powerful when it comes to nurturing a devoted playerbase. However, from a company’s perspective, this involves the risk of a star creator quitting or retiring, leaving valuable franchises hanging. We’ve seen how negatively loyal fans can respond to companies rebooting franchises without the involvement of their OG developers, so the matter is a lot more complicated than simply owning rights.
Amidst these circumstances, it doesn’t come as a big surprise that Capcom made a conscious effort to stop depending on auteur-driven development, and it’s likely far from the only developer to do so either. From a gamer’s perspective, however, it is also a shame that this kind of eccentric, highly-individualistic approach is losing its place in mainstream, large-scale game development.
Interestingly, Hideki Kamiya, who happens to be a Capcom veteran and is another prime example of creator-led game design, has previously expressed regret about game development becoming more “product-focused” than “creator-focused” in recent times, which was one of the reasons why he decided to establish the independent studio CLOVERS, intended to nurture games that reflect their creator’s individuality.
