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Capcom Prefers Not To Collaborate With Western Developers
Japan is a completely different world. Its coffee comes in vending machines, for heaven’s sake! So we’re not surprised that sometimes this world doesn’t mesh with our own. Jun Takeuchi, general manager of Capcom’s R&D division and producer for game like Lost Planet and Resident Evil 5, recently expressed frustration with working with western developers.
“Cultural differences don’t allow for the smooth collaboration between Japan and developers overseas,” Takeuchi said in a recent internal investor relations interview. It’s hard not to see where Takeuchi is coming from as Capcom has had a string of bad western-developed games.
The company recently released Spyborgs (a game by the California-based studio Bionic Games) to poor reception. Earlier in the summer Swedish developer Grin worked with Capcom to reboot the Bionic Commando franchise. The results were so disastrous that Grin was forced to close its doors permanently. Dark Void, from Seattle-based Airtight Games, llooks like it isn’t turning out as well as we’d hoped.
Hopefully Dead Rising 2, from the Vancouver studio Blue Castle Games, can break this trend. We certainly believe that both western and eastern developers have ideas worth merit, but we imagine that its hard for a company to get two teams with different management and design philosophies to work in synergy. Hopefully Takeuchi’s dealings with western designers haven’t turned him off completely from working with companies outside Japan.
What do you think? Do you have a preference between western and eastern developed games?
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