With Monster Hunter Wilds and perhaps more waiting in the wings.
Japanese game company Capcom has reported record sales and predicted even bigger returns are to come, with big hitter
Monster Hunter Wilds waiting in the wings.
Capcom sold 45.89 million units of video games during the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024, a record for the long-running company behind the likes of Monster Hunter and Resident Evil. Net sales were up 21% year-on-year, and profit was up 18.1%.
Capcom said it achieved this result off the back of the release of
Street Fighter 6 in June 2023 and
Dragon’s Dogma 2 in March 2024. Street Fighter 6 has now sold 3.3 million units, and
Dragon’s Dogma 2 has shifted 2.62 million. Both games, as well as continued sales of older games, made for record-high net sales, the seventh consecutive year of record-high profit at all levels, and Capcom’s 11th consecutive year of operating income growth.
In its forecast for the current financial year ending March 2025, Capcom predicted even bigger sales and profits, which would result in 12 consecutive years of operating income growth and eight consecutive years of record high profit at all levels.
Capcom has Monster Hunter Wilds due out at some point in 2025, and is heavily rumored to be preparing Resident Evil 9, the next mainline Resident Evil game, for release during this financial year.
Capcom’s success comes during one of the toughest times for the video game industry in recent memory, with a number of high-profile studio closures, thousands of job losses, and a raft of canceled projects. Just this week,
Microsoft announced the closure of Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks and Redfall developer Arkane Austin as part of deep cuts at ZeniMax, with the warning that more is to come. PlayStation maker
Sony has made cuts of its own, as has a long list of publishers and developers.
Capcom, however, appears to be enjoying perhaps its most successful period ever. Just last month,
Capcom announced plans to pay out more money to its shareholders after the breakout success of Dragon’s Dogma 2, which
sold 2.5 million copies across PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S in just 11 days.
To put Dragon’s Dogma 2’s sales into context, it took the first Dragon’s Dogma game a month to sell 1.05 million units after it went on sale at the end of May 2012, a tally Capcom declared a success at the time.
Capcom’s best-selling game of all-time is 2018’s Monster Hunter World, which has shifted just shy of 20 million units. The company will be hoping to repeat the trick when Monster Hunter Wilds goes on sale next year.