JBoc924Having moved on from Capcom to head his own company, prolific developer and once R&D head for said company, Keiji Inafune has openly spoken about his former employer and their attitude towards sequels and original IPs.
According to Inafune, Capcom was focusing solely on sequels, what with 70-80 percent of their products being planned to be continuations of already established series, upon the close of the PS2 era. This, of course, left only 20 percent being dedicated to truly original IPs that could sprout new franchises. Capcom went on to invest money in the development of game prototypes to test out original concepts, Lost Planet and Dead Rising happened to be two of those prototypes.
Capcom actually declined both Lost Planet and Dead Rising whilst in their prototype builds, but this didn’t stop Inafune from continuing his work on them. It eventually got to a point in which Capcom had already spent a sufficient amount of money on both projects, leaving them no choice but to finalize both original IPs and release them. Now, both Lost Planet and Dead Rising have gone on to sell millions of copies and garner just as much fans, which is quite fortunate for Inafune, since he was going to be “fired for war crimes” if things had gone the opposite route.
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