Capcom’s SVP Discusses Mega Man Legends 3 and Transparency

LanceHeart

March 15, 2012

Sitting down with Game Informer at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, Capcom’s Senior Vice-President of Planning and Business Development Christian Svensson discussed a whole host of issues, from Resident Evil to the iPad to the ongoing battle with typos. Most importantly for Mega Man fans, he was asked about the concept of utilizing fan input in games, the ongoing issues with transparency, explaining business decisions, and the Street Fighter x Tekken DLC controversy:

Knowing what you know now about the result of the Mega Man Legends 3 project, would you change anything in the decision-making process [to include fan input]? Are you still happy you tried this experiment?

The transparency and involvement from the fans, it turned out to be a double-edged sword. In the end it’s still something I want to do more of. I don’t think we as an industry do enough of it. Being that transparent, unfortunately, opens the wounds much greater when something bad happens. I wouldn’t have changed that. As for the decision to not move forward with the project, I’d prefer to not comment on that.

There’s been a recent explosion over Street Fighter X Tekken having downloadable content already on the disc. Was it more of a PR situation where you have to be better explaining to fans upfront what is going on with something like this?

It came down to a development process issue more than anything. I wish it had been done differently. I think it just becomes — the rationality of what content costs to make and how you fund that content doesn’t come into play here for the consumer. It’s an emotional issue that I think we need to be sensitive to. The other part of this is we could have had a better communication strategy around this back at the outset. Left to their own devices, consumers will always jump to the worst possible conclusion. I think what you’ll see in the coming weeks the conclusions that were jumped to were not the correct ones.

While we all wish Svensson would have commented more about the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3, it is obvious that the decision to cancel is still being handled with extreme sensitivity. Going forward it’ll be interesting to see how Capcom plays with transparency and fan outreach, not to mention how it handles explaining its business decisions in the future.

Source: Game Informer