Following the announcement of its super-positive financial results, Capcom hosted a Q&A session for investors and analysts, teasing a big unannounced game.
According to the transcript provided by Capcom and translated from Japanese by TechRaptor, the Osaka-based publisher has an ace up its sleeve.
The company has sold, in the first half of the fiscal year, 22.6 million units of its video games, but that's only half of its annual target of 45 million units.
Asked how the company plans to achieve its target, the company's executives answered that they're going to release Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy alongside a major unannounced game in the second half of the fiscal year.
They also plan to keep expanding sales of the games released in the first half of the fiscal year, like Street Fighter 6.
The unannounced game was actually teased in two separate answers. It's worth mentioning that Japanese doesn't make a clear distinction between plural and singular, so this could be about multiple new games, albeit the context makes me lean toward one.
There's also a possibility that they're talking about Dragon's Dogma 2 (about which you can read our preview and interview with the developers from Tokyo Game Show). Occasionally, in Japanese corporate environments, games that don't have an announced release date a defined simply as "unannounced," but it's fairly rare.
On the other hand, Capcom has been keen, as of late, to launch major games only months after their announcement, so getting a big reveal possibly at The Game Awards followed by a release by March 31, 2024 (which is when the fiscal year ends) is entirely within the realm of realism.
Interestingly, Capcom has already announced a Monster Hunter collaboration for season 3 of Exoprimal, which is happening conveniently in the first quarter of 2024. The fact that they did not mention Monster Hunter Rise, but a generic title, prompted some to speculate that a new game of the series is coming soon.
It's also worth mentioning that on March 11, 2024, the series will celebrate its 20th anniversary. That being said, the executives were asked explicitly in the Q&A about a new game to celebrate the anniversary and they declined to provide any answer.
During the same Q&A, Capcom mentioned that the PC market continues to grow and the ratio of PC sales among its customers continues to rise.
Speaking of Exoprimal, we also learn that its inclusion in Microsoft's Game Pass was the main factor for a large year-on-year spike in licensing revenue (from 2.2 billion yen to 3.7 billion for the first half of the fiscal year).
