Feature: 'Interview: Capcom Marketing VP Charles Bellfield'

For today's in-depth Gamasutra interview, Capcom marketing VP Charles Bellfield discusses the success of Phoenix Wright, the closing of Clover Studios, the AIAS voting controversy, and key Capcom games from Resident Evil 5 to Inafune's new Wii game. In this excerpt, Bellfield explains that though the closing of Clover Studios may have been seen as a setback to Capcom's future producing smaller arthouse games, with the majority of Clover talent left at Capcom, the reality might not be so bleak: ”Capcom, unlike most other developers, doesn't have dedicated strict boundaries between each of its development teams. We actually have one pool of development talent at Capcom and those individuals are basically assigned based on the timescales of each product we're working on, so everybody does work on a variety of content and games at Capcom... with the exception of Clover, where we did create a separate entity which was based on one of the sixteen floors in Osaka, where the other fifteen floors had everybody else on it. That Clover team was a seperate identity – it was managed by [Atsushi] Inaba-san, [Shinji] Mikami-san and [Hideki] Kamiya-san, and the three of them were essentially the individuals that made Clover, plus with the team staff they had about 80 people in total. Our games need to at least break even and add value back to our shareholders, so it's impossible to make games that are not profitable over and over again. What actually happened is Mikami-san, Kamiya-san and Inaba-san chose to leave the company and do something else and the rest of the Clover team was just incorporated back into the rest of Capcom's development talent pool. So in fact, while three individuals left, Clover Studios as a separate entity was merged back into the rest of the Capcom teams and today, still, the talent we had, with the exception of three people, is still remaining at Capcom.” You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, with much more from Bellfield on Capcom, including how the company excels at marketing Eastern games in the West (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external websites).