Devil May Cry and Ace Attorney to become ‘core IPs’ at Capcom

Capcom won’t be ditching Resident Evil and Monster Hunter any time soon, but it wants some of its lesser-known IPs to become just as popular.

It’s been obvious for a while that Capcom is enjoying something of a hot streak at the moment. The company’s biggest franchises are doing so well that it can afford to throw money behind Onimusha and Ōkami revivals, as well as original projects like Pragmata and Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess.

As such, fans of other more neglected Capcom franchises are hopeful they’ll benefit from this trend sooner rather than later. And from the sound of things, that patience should be rewarded.

Capcom has said that it’s interested in growing certain franchises into core IPs, including Devil May Cry – which hopefully means a Devil May Cry 6 will finally happen.

This comes from a recent corporate report outlining Capcom’s strategies for future growth, with company president and chief operating officer Haruhiro Tsujimoto saying that the goal is to ‘sustain our KPI [key performance indicator] of 10% or better annual operating profit growth along with our long-term goal of annual software sales of 100 million units.’

Basically, Capcom wants to keep selling a lot of games every year and maintain its current success rate. A big part of that is obviously to support Capcom’s three biggest franchises: Street Fighter, Resident Evil, and Monster Hunter.

However, Tsujimoto acknowledges that Capcom has ‘a wealth of globally popular brands’ it can take more advantage of: ‘We aim to expand our user base and improve our performance through new releases, remakes, and ports of titles in these series to new hardware. By enhancing brand power and cultivating loyal fan bases, we will grow these into core IPs.’

Hopefully, this includes Dino Crisis, but the only three examples Tsujimoto gives are Devil May Cry, Mega Man, and Ace Attorney. Those franchises’ lead protagonists are even included in a Beatles-esque line-up early on in the report, alongside Street Fighter and Resident Evil characters.

We’re honestly shocked that Capcom only now seems interested in doing more with Devil May Cry, considering it already successfully revitalised the brand once before, with 2019’s Devil May Cry 5 – following a six-year hiatus.

It was a critical and commercial success, but there hasn’t been so much as a whisper about a sequel since. Capcom’s no doubt been emboldened to do more with it, though, thanks to the Devil May Cry Netflix show driving up sales of the games, with Devil May Cry 5 even outperforming the far newer Monster Hunter Wilds.

As for Mega Man and Ace Attorney, Capcom’s kept them relevant over the years through various compilations of older games, but neither series has seen a wholly new entry in years.

For Mega Man, that was 2018’s Mega Man 11, while Ace Attorney’s last new game was 2017’s The Great Ace Attorney 2, which didn’t even see a Western release (alongside its predecessor) until 2021 with The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles.

Elsewhere in the report, a list of what Capcom considers ‘world-renowned IP’ also mentions Dead Rising and Dragon’s Dogma, both of which made a return last year via an updated remaster for the former and a sequel for the latter.

It’s far too soon for Dragon’s Dogma to get a new entry, but it was recently rumoured that Capcom plans to kind of, sort of reboot Dead Rising with a direct sequel to the first game.

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