Capcom powers up $10M quarterly profit

Nintendo, Sony, and Electronic Arts all released their quarterly reports this week, and while the news was mixed, the common theme among them is that sales were up. Capcom today provided further evidence of the game industry's health today with its own financial report for the three months ended June 30.

The Resident Evil publisher posted revenues of ¥16.35 billion ($151 million), up more than 14 percent from the same quarter the year before. Profits were up more substantially, more than doubling year-over-year to ¥2.38 billion ($22 million), up from ¥1.13 billion ($10 million).

The only game singled out as a particularly strong seller was Monster Hunter Freedom 2G, which Capcom said "drastically increased both sales and profits." The latest addition to Capcom's action-role-playing series released on the PlayStation Portable in Japan in late March, and has already racked up 2.4 million sales. According to the publisher, it is the first Japanese PSP game to hit the 2 million mark.

Despite the game's success, Capcom stuck by its previous fiscal year forecast "due to continuous weak performance of arcade operations business." The publisher doubtlessly hopes to see its arcade business revitalized with the Japanese arcade release of Street Fighter IV, which was set for this summer. The publisher today said it hopes to have the game in arcades "more or less on schedule."

As for the home editions of Street Fighter IV, Capcom projected the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC editions to sell 1.7 million. That's more than the 1.5 million the publisher expects to sell of the new Bionic Commando on the same systems, but significantly less than the 2.3 million copies of Resident Evil 5 it has projected to sell on the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Over on the Wii, Capcom expects the recently announced Dead Rising: Chop 'til you Drop to rack up 500,000 in sales. That's significantly less than its last zombie remake for Nintendo's system, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, which notched more than a million sales worldwide.