Capcom’s executive producer initially said that they wanted Resident Evil 7: Biohazard to be a live-service game with online multiplayer and micro-purchases. We were losing another more beautiful series to greed for money and content that had nothing to do with the series!
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Capcom was just eating away at Resident Evil 7.
In a new video with Shinji Mikami on the official Biohazard YouTube channel, Jun Takeuchi explained how much pressure Capcom has put on its development team to implement the features in question. “When we started working on Resident Evil 7, we were back in the ‘what is fear?’ debate,” Takeuchi said. He went on to say:
“I’ve talked a lot with [Resident Evil 7 director] Nakanishi about what we should do. In fact, we talked about it even before we started working on RE7. And at that moment, there was a marketing pressure at Capcom saying ‘we have to make the games that the players want’.
So we were being told, ‘Do this, do that,’ and those were really tough times for directors. ‘Online multiplayer, downloadable content, live service games, micro-transformations’ they were saying make a Resident Evil game that includes all of this!.
He explains how he started working on the project:
“It was January 4, the first working day of the new year. The president called me into his office. Resident Evil 7 was in pretty bad shape. He said, ‘Takeuchi-kun, go in and help!’ So I started working on Resident Evil 7.”
He also revealed that as soon as Takeuchi started working as the game’s director, Capcom was trying to remove the live service and micro-purchases it was trying to implement. They have argued that the Resident Evil franchise has its roots in horror elements, and that the multiplayer genre can quickly disrupt that. In his own words, they demolished Capcom’s list of them, became marketers’ worst nightmare, and eventually made it a traditional single-player horror game. They approached it a little modestly, but we can also say that they took Resident Evil 7 off the rope.
As a result, the game was a great success, scoring 86 points on Metacritic and making players happy. If it were up to Capcom, things could have gone a lot differently.
