Capcom's 'decline in quality' blamed on 'excessive outsourcing'

Capcom has announced it is revising sales forecasts downwards for its current crop of big-name titles, attributing part of the failure on "excessive outsourcing."

The publisher now expects Resident Evil 6 to shift 4.9 million copies, down from five million. Capcom's original sales estimation for Resident Evil 6 was seven million copies.

Ninja Theory's reboot of DmC: Devil May Cry is now expected to sell 1.15 million copies, also down from its original forecast of two million.

Capcom also highlighted a "delayed response to the expanding digital contents market" and "insufficient coordination between the marketing and game development divisions in overseas markets" as reasons for its disappointing sales.

The publisher now plans to more heavily promote its DLC strategies and focus more on internal development.

As a result, the Japanese publisher has warned of a "special loss" in its business as part of a 7.2 billion Yen (£48 million/$73 million) restructuring. Capcom warns that, because of this process, it has "strictly re-evaluated" some currently unannounced games in production.

The results of poor sales and restructuring is that the company has slashed its expected net income for the financial year ended March 31, 2013 by over half: 2.9 million Yen, down from 6.5 million Yen.

Capcom recently announced a two-month delay of Lost Planet 3, which it has outsourced to Spark Unlimited.

Rival Japanese publisher Square Enix has also recently announced a costly bout of restructuring.