More Okami Sales Needed For Sequel

by Kev Lochun on July 29, 2008 at 6:30 pm

It was public demand that caused Capcom to port Okami over to Wii in the first place, but they won’t cave when it comes to a sequel-– it’s a dead franchise unless the first one starts paying the rent.

Capcom’s vice president of strategic planning and business development, Christian Svensson, addressed the idea of a sequel over on the Capcom Unity forums. It wasn’t pretty:

“I think we need a lot more people buying the current version before we seriously consider a sequel.”

How many more? He couldn’t say because investor relations haven’t released the worldwide sales figures. Part of the problem is that Okami has suffered much like Ico, being a critical hit with very little commercial push, something Svensson readily concedes.

“Retailers decide what to put on their shelf and how much of it,” he says. “Obviously, we push as hard as we can to make that happen. Sometimes retailers opt to not take product or they take only a small quantity. And how good the game is, unfortunately, is only a part of the equation.”

Another part of that equation is marketing, which neither the PS2 or Wii version of Okami had very much of. Shadow of the Colossus certainly didn’t suffer the same fate as Ico after an ad campaign was put behind it, and it was every bit as outlandish as Okami.

That said, there’s no guarantee a sequel be very good anyway. Developer Clover Studios was shut down in late 2007. Its intellectual properties were absorbed back into Capcom, but its talent, sadly, was not.

Source: Capcom Unity forums

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