Capcom has hit a rough spell, and the first thing to do when you screw up is blame something else.
In its latest note to investors, Capcom has lowered sales forecasts for two of its high-budget games. Resident Evil 6 has been dropped from 6 to 4.9 million, while DmC: Devil May Cry has gone down substantially from 2 to 1.15 million. In total, its latest two games have over 2 million sales less than anticipated and far lower Metacritic scores than their predecessors.
The company placed blame on what it called a "delayed response to the expanding digital contents market" and "insufficient coordination between the marketing and game development divisions in overseas markets". In other words, digital market negligence and bad outsourcing jobs.
Capcom's tardiness to support the growing digital market was to be expected. Digital sales have grown immensely over the past few years, with even Nintendo being surprised by the results. Outsourcing, on the other hand, isn't that big of a problem, but mixed with the aggressive redesign of both titles from previous installments made for a precarious position.
Stagnating a series can be disasterous as well, but if you're going to make major changes to a successful series, you should at least retain what made it that way in the first place.
