Buggy, half-finished games will one day be a thing of that past, according to Capcom’s Jun Takeuchi.
Jun Takeuchi, producer of Resident Evil 5 and the manager of Capcom’s production division, believes that in the future there will be fewer games released in a year, not more. In his opinion, poorly made games will have no place in the videogames market, as consumers become much more selective about what they buy.
Takeuchi thinks that the market will stop being characterized by a new game grabbing all the attention and that it will split into distinct groups. On one side, you will have games made for a small group of hardcore gamers, and on the other you will have games that will target a wider audience and focus on delivering a sense of entertainment. Takeuchi uses the Resident Evil series as an example of the kind of mass market games that he’s referring to.
The secret to success in the future, he says, will be to cultivate the elements for both types of games, and more specifically for Japanese developers, to better understand the Western market in order to maximize each game’s potential there.
If Takeuchi is correct, and the quality of a game’s construction won’t be a concern anymore, it’s going to be be interesting to see how that affects the way that people buy games and how we decide whether they’re good or bad. A game can be damned because of the flaws in its construction, but it can also be great despite them. Personally, I don’t think that we’re ever going to eliminate low-quality shovelware designed to make a quick buck, but it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine a future where gamers are increasingly less willing to accept a broken product.
