Capcom Reports Record Earnings for Fourth Year in a Row
Capcom has once again had a record year. Thanks to the success of the Resident Evil and Monster Hunter series and ever-growing digital sales, the company reported (for fourth consecutive year) record earnings.
Capcom published a financial report for the previous fiscal year. The company definitely can not complain, because for the fourth consecutive year the Japanese publisher reports a record 12 months. During this time, sales increased by 16.8%, to over 95 billion yen ($873 million), and the company's operating profit increased by more than half (to 34.6 billion yen, roughly $318 million). But apparently this is still not enough for Capcom, which expects to break records also in the next fiscal year. Probably the company's enthusiasm was influenced by the warm reception and great sales of Resident Evil Village.
Although, of course, the eighth installment of Resident Evil did not help the company in the past fiscal year, the series still contributed greatly to Capcom's success. Resident Evil 2 in its new guise continues to find new buyers, and the refreshed Resident Evil 3 has sold 3.9 million copies. However, this is nothing compared to the success of another title from the publisher's catalog. By the end of March, 4 million copies of Monster Hunter: Rise were shipped, and that despite the fact that the game launched in the last week of the month, and even then only on a single platform. Monster Hunter: World is also not complaining about popularity thanks to the Iceborne expansion. The report also mentions Devil May Cry 5's strong performance on 9-gen consoles.
Capcom still intends to focus mainly on the digital market. It's hardly surprising since the previous report mentioned that digital copies of games accounted for nearly 80% of all copies sold by the publisher. The summary of the past fiscal year also mentions higher sales (by over 25%) and operating profits (by 53.1%) from digital market compared to the previous twelve months. This can partly be explained by the ongoing pandemic, which probably also contributed to the much worse performance of slot machine games (especially in terms of operating profit, which was down 87.7% year-over-year).
