Teppo Holmqvist Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 2006 October 12th Everyone Company name: Corporation [kapukon] Representative name: Representative President Tsujimoto construction (Code: The 9697 Tokyo Stock Exchange & Osaka Stock Exchange 1st section) Ahead communicating: Public information IR room Telephone number: (06) 6920-3623 Dispersion of this corporation subsidiary company and the news regarding clearing off Because this corporation resolved the dispersion of the clover studio corporation which is the subsidiary company of this corporation in the board of directors of 2006 October 12th opening, we inform. Description 1. Summary of the subsidiary company which it disperses (1) trade name: Clover studio corporation (2) address: Plain town three Chome 2 - 8 inside the Osaka city Chuo Ku (3) representative name: Tsujimoto spring Hiro (4) establishment date: 2004 July 1st (5) capital: 90,000,000 Yen (6) business contents: Development of game software for home (7) Principal shareholder: Corporation [kapukon] 100% 1. Reason of dispersion The clover studio corporation creating the title which has creativity started doing the development of the game software for home in purpose, but in order to assure efficient development development with the selection and centralization of all groups, to disperse the same company. 2. Future schedule Clearing off joining Ryo: 2007 3 end of the month day schedule 3. Future prospect Concerning the loss seeing capital stock which accompanies the dispersion of the particular subsidiary company, in 2007 March period interim closing it is the schedule which appropriates approximately 400,000,000 Yen as a extraordinary expense. Concerning contents, we have interwoven to the correction of achievement expectation of the same date. http://ir.capcom.co.jp/news/html/061012a.html
YenRug Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 OK, barring the bad translation, it sounds like Capcom are rationalizing and centralising their subsidiary development studios into a central one.
Hellfire Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 I feel a knife in my back can someone get it out for me?
Sooj Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 I think this is a more of a relocation rather than totally killing off basically one of the best internal studios campcom owns...welll they better not kill them off.
Domstercool Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 Because of the games not selling too well, mainly down to the games been different than the norm. Shame, Okami is so damn awesome and I've just started God Hand. That is also pretty fun and sooooooooo weird.
ZeldaFreak Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 Maybe even though they are recentralizing that they can still make these weird games.
Guest Jordan Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 Its a real shame, Clover are a fantastic developer...
Dante Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 Q: Can you explain briefly why Clover Studio has been decided to be dissolved? A: Clover Studio (CS) was established in July 2004 by Capcom in order to create new type of titles. Then, the titles such as Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand were produced. At the same time, R&D at Capcom also produced some new types of titles such as Dead Rising and Lost Planet and they were regarded highly at game shows such as E3. Reviewing the existing R&D organization, we have reached the conclusion that we should be centralizing all the resources rather than running two companies. Therefore, disbandment of CS was decided. Q: We’ve heard that the famous creators such as [Resident Evil creator] Mr. [shinji] Mikami, [Okami producer] Mr. [Atsushi] Inaba and [Devil May Cry director] Mr. [Hideki] Kamiya have quit, is this true? Why didn’t they come back to Capcom? A: Mr. Mikami had already left Capcom in November 2005 but signed on a separate contract with us. Mr. Inaba and Mr. Kamiya have also left Capcom in June and July of this year respectively. Naturally, we had hoped that Mr. Inaba and Mr. Kamiya to come back to us, however, both of them told us that they wanted a new challenge at a new environment. As far as Capcom’s concerned, now all the resources should be used more effectively and more efficiently since they are centralized. Q: Apparently, CS had 64 staff at the setup of the company, what happened to those people? A: Actually, only 15 staff was still left in the company at the time of 12th October. They will be transferred to R&D at CapCom although we haven’t negotiated with them individually yet. However, we will have to examine what sort of organization is required for creating more new titles first. Q: Will copyright of the titles that were produced by CS be transferred to Capcom? A: Yes, all copyright of the CS titles will be transferred back to CapCom as a process of disbandment of the company. Q: Can you tell us more about Mr. Inaba and Mr. Kamiya? We’ve heard that they are setting up a new company. A: Since they are not our employees any longer, we can’t answer this question. Q: Don’t you think Mr. Mikami’s departure as a huge loss? Who’s going to produce Resident Evil series from now on? A: We have a signed contract with Mr. Mikami separately. In any case, we have many creators that have worked on Resident Evil series titles and have enough knowledge of the series. Mr. Mikami will also work in our R&D. By the way, Mr. Takeuchi is producing Resident Evil 5 (he’s worked on the original Resident Evil). Mr. Inaba, Mr. Mikami and Mr. Kamiya www.next-gen.biz
Hellfire Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 So Mikami DID leave when the RE4 "fiasco" ocurred. Cool.
Dante Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 WE ALL READ JOYSTIQ. THIS NEWS IS NOT FROM JOYSTIQ!
Shyguy Posted October 13, 2006 Posted October 13, 2006 i dont ready joystick.... i actually only read N-Europe :P
Cubechris Posted October 13, 2006 Posted October 13, 2006 i actually only read N-Europe :P but that site is slow...
Dcubed Posted October 13, 2006 Posted October 13, 2006 SHIT! NOOO!!!! Interesting that Mikami is continuing to work with Capcom under contract (He just can't seem to bear to give them up) thank goodness he's still there. This will be a huge blow to Capcom, two major game designers have just left. As far as major talent goes, they still have Mikami and Kenji Inafune there and they don't seem to be going anywhere so that's good. I guess Clover just cost too much to keep running (as their game sales probably didn't cover the costs of running the studio) but a lot of the staff went to Clover because they wanted to get away from the centralisation within Capcom. Now that that lifeline has been cut, they have no choice but to leave. The question is, where will Hideki Kamiya and Atsushi Inaba go now? Will they start up their own company or will they go with someone else (Imagine if they joined Nintendo!)
Dante Posted October 13, 2006 Posted October 13, 2006 Published as part of our sister-site GamesIndustry.biz' widely-read weekly newsletter, the GamesIndustry.biz Editorial is a weekly dissection of one of the issues weighing on the minds of the people at the top of the games business. It appears on Eurogamer a day after it goes out to GI.biz newsletter subscribers. One of the most disheartening things to happen to videogames in the last year is this week's announcement that Capcom's Clover Studio is being shut down, having recorded a 400 million Yen loss in the last year. On the face of it, compared to news like the delay of the PlayStation 3 in Europe, the demise of one studio doesn't seem like a major cause for sadness - but Clover Studio, in its short lifespan, demonstrated a level of creativity and innovation which made it into a beacon for the ability of games to leap beyond being pigeonholed as simple entertainment, and actually become a marriage of both entertainment, and art. Founded in 2004 by Capcom in an effort to incubate creativity and address concerns that its portfolio was stagnating, Clover housed some of the publisher's finest creative minds - and set free of the corporate decision making structure, they proceeded to build titles which captured the attention and fired the imagination of game fans the world over. Viewtiful Joe and its sequels, Okami, and finally God Hand, are the lasting legacy of the studio - and while those titles may have polarised opinion, it's impossible to ignore the creative drive behind them, and would be nothing short of heartless not to give credit to the willingness to explore new kinds of gameplay and new visual styles. Advertisement Of course, in the final analysis, Clover Studio lost money - and thus Clover Studio was shut down, with Capcom marking its passing with a vague comment to the effect that Clover had fulfilled its purpose. It would be easy to mock such a statement, but that would be cheap. Capcom may have bottled out of the Clover experiment when the losses mounted a bit, but unlike most publishers, Capcom at least had the guts to try the experiment in the first place. The sad truth is that the vast majority of videogame publishers, contrary to the lip service which they pay to innovation and creativity, don't actually understand what it takes to drive that forward. Projects are killed off when they look like they won't have the kind of profit margin a publisher wants, or when their project leads fail to stand up in front of marketing and reel off a deathly dull list of other popular titles which their game is "a bit like". Entirely original ideas have nowhere to take root in a modern publishing environment - originality means risk, and why allow your staff to take risks when you could be burning them out on a movie license with a guaranteed return instead? It's easy to scoff, from a business point of view, at the pleas for originality. Sequels sell; licenses sell. Innovation is risk, and often it's bad risk - Clover's games, despite their critical acclaim, still saw the studio losing just shy of three million Euro last year. Not a vast amount, but then again, if they'd been working on a tie-in to a summer blockbuster, they'd probably have made a profit - right? Such an argument is as logical as it is predictable, and as financially sound as it is utterly incorrect. It's the kind of argument made by videogame publishing executives who wouldn't dream of lifting a joypad in their spare time, who see the medium in terms of products, quarters and bottom lines, and manage to look, at best, incredulous but indulgent when developers, fans or, indeed, journalists mention the word "art" in the context of videogames. As well as being blinkered and short-sighted (never a good combination on the eyesight front), it's inherently damaging - short-termism at its very worst. Look to the movie business, and consider their business models with regard to smaller films. Giant movie studios and the moguls who run them create incubators for talent, funding the development of risky films and supporting the rise of new talent, new concepts and new directions. When studios or executives choose to fund films that are artistic, or creative, or simply worthy, they don't expect to get their money back, and normally they don't. Games industry executives viewing this situation must feel their jaws dropping - the movie business keeps sending good money after bad? Why? Are they insane? Of course not. It helps that movie executives are, in my own experience, much more likely to actually love their medium than videogames executives are - but more importantly, they recognise that while you might lose money on ten small projects, there's a chance that the eleventh could be the one that opens up a whole new market, creates a word of mouth phenomenon, makes your studio into the creative darling of the film world and sees a new talent explode onto the scene. Not to mention making you a great big bucket of money - and if it doesn't, well, what's a few million bucks compared to what you're going to make from that Johnny Depp and Ben Affleck starring summer blockbuster you've got lined up? That, in essence, is why we should mourn the passing of Clover Studio. The 400 million Yen (about 2.7 million Euro) which the studio lost would have been buried in the money Capcom will inevitably make from the next Resident Evil game. Equally, Electronic Arts could easily afford to fund innovation from the proceeds of its big franchises (and letting Will Wright do a project every few years and then referring to it every time someone says the word "innovate" doesn't count), as could Ubisoft, Activision, Sega... The list goes on, until it encompasses practically every publisher in the industry. It's counter-intuitive, and enough to make a business graduate gag - but until this industry learns to make games which it knows won't make money, this industry will always play second fiddle to every other creative industry. www.eurogamer.net
mcj metroid Posted October 13, 2006 Posted October 13, 2006 well......am........ok they did viewtiful joe thats all i really care about i guess
Recommended Posts