Japanese publisher Capcom announced its intention to make the PC its primary platform at the end of 2021. That now seems to have happened.
Historically, Capcom is not precisely a PC-centric game publisher. Even today, the Japanese giant’s best-selling games list on its ‘Platinum Titles’ page includes many non-PC titles. However, the company said in October 2021 that it intends to make the PC its primary platform. This strategy will comprise 50% of sales on PC by 2022 or 2023. It looks like a good job has been done by all because the company’s latest financial results show the mission was accomplished.
A Q&A following Capcom’s second-quarter results revealed the percentage increase on PC. When asked what percentage of PC sales to total units were at the end of the quarter, the company replied, “Approximately 50%, primarily driven by catalogue title sales growth”.
In its second-quarter report, Capcom revealed that its sales and profits for the first half of the fiscal year showed a “relative decline” because no major new releases rival the survival horror game Resident Evil Village, which exploded in the first half of the previous year. However, the year’s first half showed “solid progress against the full-year plan”. Capcom has raised its full-year sales volume forecast due to an increase in catalogue game sales. (That is, with continued sales of the company’s older games.)
In the first half of the company’s fiscal 2020, catalogue game sales were just under 11 million units, accounting for 79.3% of the company’s total sales. That number increased to 13.2 million in the first half of fiscal ’21. But the proportion fell to 66.7%, thanks to the success of the newly released Resident Evil Village. Catalogue sales rose again in the first half of this year. To 16.1 million, to be precise, the total sales percentage also jumped to 75.4%. That’s not relatively as high as in 2020, thanks to a comparable increase in new unit sales that year.
It’s also notable that the percentage of digital sales jumped to 91.5% in the first half of this fiscal year, compared to just 70.2% in the same period last year.
This presumably reflects the rise in purchases of older games via digital platforms (which is the most common way to buy any game on PC anyway.) It could also shift for new games coming out in the next few years, which could reduce the overall PC sales share. However, Capcom does not think this is likely. It predicts that digital sales will remain roughly stable at around 90% in the next financial year, another sign that PC sales are expected to stay strong.
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