Capcom may be the happiest AAA publisher in games right now, and it's reported yet more good news on the heels of Street Fighter 6's explosive launch, which has helped put the company "on track to achieve 11 consecutive years of full-year operating profit growth."
The company's latest financial statements are awash with eye-popping margins that even us non-bean counters can easily understand to be mighty impressive. For the quarter ending June 30, 2023, total net sales were up 73.8% year-over-year, and 90.7% for its gaming arm – or "digital contents business" – specifically.
The important context there is that 2022's net sales for the same period were down 48.9% compared to the 2021 success of Resident Evil Village, which fueled its own massive 104.1% spike over 2020. This up-and-down pattern is typical of release-driven businesses like games, and it's actually good news for Capcom overall because it shows that its new games are consistently yielding big sales that move the needle.
Street Fighter 6 is the talk of the town this quarter, having already hit 1.97 million units sold. To the delight of Mega Man fans everywhere, Capcom also acknowledges Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection Volumes 1 and 2, which have sold 1.32 million units combined.
The Resident Evil 4 remake is still a driving force several months after launch as well. Capcom says it's now topped 4.95 million units sold, and even its contribution is just a fraction of the publisher's reported catalog sales, which surpassed 9.8 million units in the quarter.
Monster Hunter Rise and its Sunbreak expansion, which are still getting great updates and found new life on PC after an initial Switch release, get a nod in the report. So does Resident Evil 2, which likely saw an uptick in the hype around Resident Evil 4. Overall, game sales went from 11.7 million to 13.5 million year-over-year, and Capcom is predicting stronger sales in the future.
The unifying theme here is that all of these games are really good and keeping their decades-old franchises in fighting form. Capcom's been on a string of triumphs for years now and shows no signs of slowing down, even if experiments like its new dinosaur shooter, per our Exoprimal review, end up being a bit of a mess.
Last month, Capcom delayed its mysterious sci-fi game Pragmata once again, this time indefinitely.
