Aiming for the moon doesn’t scare him: reinforced by the success of its main franchises, the Japanese studio Capcom is betting on something new with “Pragmata”, an action video game set in a lunar base.
Available Friday, the title follows the setbacks of an astronaut in a station that has fallen into the hands of a hostile artificial intelligence controlling dangerous robots.
Focusing on dynamic and sometimes weightless confrontations, it also asks players to solve small puzzles to carry out hacks in order to weaken their opponents while shooting them.
A rather original mechanism embodied on screen via a young android who accompanies the hero.
The proposal for “Pragmata” was rather well received by the specialist press, posting an overall score of 86 out of 100 on the review aggregation site Metacritic.
This step away from the studio behind the Resident Evil and Monster Hunter sagas is made possible thanks to the comfortable mattress given to it by the unfailing success of its main series.
Released at the end of February, “Resident Evil Requiem” has already sold more than six million copies, ranking at the top of sales in many countries and boosting the sales of previous episodes.
Enough to allow Capcom to envisage record results, while the studio aims to exceed one billion euros in turnover for its staggered 2025-2026 financial year.
Rigueur
An almost insolent success in an industry which is going through a downturn after the prosperous period linked to the pandemic, forcing many international publishers to close studios and lay off people to stay afloat or maintain their margins.
“Capcom is currently experiencing its golden age and seems to be making almost no major mistakes as a company,” Serkan Toto, an analyst at Kantan Games in Tokyo, told AFP.
Founded in 1983, the Osaka-based company has been experiencing a period of continuous growth for more than ten years, to the point that it began construction of a second building near its headquarters to accommodate its new employees.
Their number continues to grow, going from around 3,200 in 2022 to more than 3,760 in 2025.
“Capcom demonstrates great rigor as a studio, emphasizing quality, building on its successful franchises and respecting release deadlines,” underlines Mr. Toto.
“This rigor also translates into what he doesn’t do: blindly buying other studios” or “throwing headlong into online games,” he continues.
Other giants of the sector have experienced bitter failures in recent years in this sector, like Sony and its competitive shooter “Concord”, disconnected in less than two weeks.
Originalité risquée
Because in video games, thinking outside the box is rarely a very profitable choice, and Capcom has experienced this.
“Pragmata” is the studio’s third recent attempt to launch an original title after “Exoprimal” (2023) and “Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess” (2024), “which both failed,” recalls Hideki Yasuda, analyst at Toyo Securities.
Available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, Capcom’s new production is also released on Switch 2, which is rather rare for a recent blockbuster, Nintendo’s new console being less powerful than its competitors.
“As Capcom develops its own engine (software to create a video game, Editor’s note) internally, it can adapt to the hardware much more quickly than its competitors,” underlines Mr. Yasuda, which allows the studio to reach a maximum number of players.
In certain European markets, the Switch 2 version of the latest opus of Resident Evil represented “around 5% of sales” according to the specialist media The Game Business, “not a huge figure” but which could still “represent a significant sum and be profitable”.
In addition, the company is constantly seeking to expand its audience by increasing the number of feature films and series adapted from its universes.
Two new films Resident Evil and Street Fighter should see the light of day this year.
 â–
