Resident Evil 7 Confirmed

Capcom and gamers were disappointed with the product known as Resident Evil 6.  A lot of hype but little improvement lead to low sales and poor consumer ratings. This time around Capcom promises to do more with Resident Evil 7: The War Ends Now.

In an interview for  The Market for Computer & Video Games (MVC) a Capcom representative stated: "We have obviously seen the consumer response and the PR response, "former Capcom marketing boss Michael Pattison told MCV. There was some great positives out of that, but it was a mixed bag, as we saw from the review scores.  We have got to take that on-board, we can't ignore that, and we have to take that onto the next game when we make the next Resident Evil".

He added: "With Resident Evil 6 specifically, we probably put too much content in there, there were comments from consumers that said it felt bloated.  The Leon missions went down very well, and because we did Resident Evil Revelations on 3DS, there was a cry out for us to focus our attention on survival horror, rather than be too many things to all people.  You'll find where we go next will likely be more targeted at our core fan base".

The Capcom representative continued to say, " A lot is said about the saturation of this zombie, post-apocalyptic survival horror.  But it is still alive and well.  The Last of Us shows a good direction of what the consumers want.  Tomb Raider as well, we spoke to R&D and they looked at the and they enjoyed that experience.  I think that proves there is still a strong market for that sort of content".

Capcom, you finally get the message that focusing on survival horror, targeting the core fan base, and taking the Micheal Bay movies out of the games will finally produce better sells.  Well, lets hope that Capcom didn't learn their lesson too late.

I believe Capcom has finally taken their collective heads out their butts and started to listen to the demands of the market instead of what they think should be the next direction for gaming.  I believe a lot of gaming companies are caught up by what Shigeru Miyamoto said 20+ years ago about Donkey Kong 2 and 3 when asked why does the banana tallies serve no purpose in the games other than just counting the bananas you collect.

Miyamoto jokingly laughed off the repeated gaming glitch and claimed foreign markets do not care about content of games.  All the Western [hemisphere] markets care about is that the game has a lot of pretty graphics.  

The Last of Us proved to video game marketing "experts" that the most important thing to consumers isn't the game being trendy or flashy.  The most important thing to consumers is that the game is actually good!

The Last of Us didn't sell just because it was a next generation survival horror game.  The Last of Us sold because word spread among consumers how amazing and fun the game was.  Unlike in Resident Evil 6 where the word spread how big a disappointment the game was and how the game tried to do much with a focus on quantity over quality.

High quality of the game is what ensures you'll have a loyal fan base not just a bunch of repetitive content with a reunion of popular characters from the franchise.  In terms of Resident Evil 6, you can have 7 characters and 30+ hours of game-play, but if the levels and characters actions are the same what's the point of playing a game that long?  In terms of The Last of Us, you can have 2 characters and 12-15 hours of solid game-play and that's good enough.

For Resident Evil 7 let's hope the marketing department takes notes from the success of The Last of Us and gets to work on researching consumer interest and developers focus and take the quality of the content into consideration.