GDC: Lost Planet creator disses Clover

March 9th, 2007, 21:07 Posted By: Shrygue

via GamePro

Capcom's Keiji Inafune doesn't buy into the whole "video games are an art form" spiel. The creative force behind such games as Lost Planet and the Mega Man series believes strongly that video games are first and foremost a business, and the level of success a game receives is proportional only to the number of copies it sells at the end of the day.

So with that mindset intact, Inafune didn't have many kind words to relay to the former producers at Clover, Capcom's now-defunct development studio previously responsible for Okami and Viewtiful Joe. In a session at GDC hosted by Newsweek's N'Gai Croal, he spoke candidly about Clover's inability to produce a successful bottom line in spite of rave critical reviews:

Perhaps I might get into trouble if I say this in front of people from the mass media. Games are not a work of art. It's actually a product. If we think of it as a work of art, then... when we think about Picasso and Van Gogh's paintings, the end result is beauty, so it doesn't matter if you sell it or not. However for games, it's a product. It is a commodity. The producer has to think about that.

Okami and Viewtiful Joe, I think, are wonderful games and because they are wonderful games I think, the job of the director was fantastic. But the producer didn't do his work. The producers work is to make the team make good games and then sell those games. The producer has to do the promotion. They have to think about the promotion. The producer has to take those good games and think about how to deliver it to as many users as possible. Certainly to get good reviews is part of his job. However, the producer has to make sure the game sells [on par with the review]. I think the producer dropped the ball there. Capcom said they would do it, but Clover said "Oh, we'll do it ourselves." And I think this was a failure.

Great directors may exist in great numbers, however, if you don't have a good producer it won't lead to sales. And I think this Clover Studios example is a really good example of that.

Consistent with other remarks made in the past (although not nearly as vocal), the Lost Planet team has made something of a name for themselves by evangelizing to Japanese development teams about the importance of broadening their global audience. Producer Jun Takeuchi himself had stated in a previous interview that most Japanese developers are in danger of isolating themselves by concentrating exclusively on Japanese niche markets.

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