Capcom president and COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto says the company’s continued success in recent years is down to a switch in focus from auteur-led to team-led development.
In an interview with Famitsu, Tsujimoto – who is the son of Capcom founder and CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto, and has been president and CEO since 2007 – was asked how some of the company’s most popular series have managed to thrive for decades even though the same creators aren’t always in charge of their development.
Tsujimoto replied that in the past Capcom’s development studios had been similar to those of other companies, in that their major IPs were considered the property of a specific creator.
“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,” he explained (as translated by Automaton).
“If that person doesn’t make one, there’s no next instalment. The direction of the series becomes tied to the ideas of a single creator.”
This was the mindset for a while at Capcom, according to Tsujimoto, but started to change when the company felt that auteur-led development had its limitations, especially when it came to making shareholders happy (the company was first listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2000).
“We discussed the issue with the central figures behind each franchise and ultimately agreed that we should abandon that approach,” he explained. “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 suggested that because each new game in a series isn’t driven by the ideas of just one single person, but created as a team, the know-how accumulated by that team can be passed on to the next generation of developers and each series can continue to a similarly high standard.
Noting that a lot of today’s Capcom developers were fans of the company’s games before joining, he added (via machine translation): “We’ve gathered together a group of people who played Capcom games and thought ‘this is fun’ and ‘I want to make one myself’. That’s why the IP mindset is naturally passed down.
“Whether it’s development, marketing, or promotion, our strength lies in the fact that we’re able to work together as one – not as individuals, but as a team – driven by the desire to create and sell our own products. In that sense, Pragmata, which was just released in April 2026, is a new IP that truly embodies this team-first approach to game development.”
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