Mega Man designer Keiji Inafune says developers shouldn’t only cling to past successes
Sequels to IPs are important, but new ideas are needed too, the Dead Rising and Onimusha producer says
Mega Man designer Keiji Inafune has said that game developers shouldn’t only cling to their past successes.
Inafune attended the Console Game Developer Conference in South Korea last week, where he gave a presentation on developer mindsets in a changing games industry.
As reported by This is Game, Inafune – who was character designer on the Mega Man series and producer on the Onimusha, Dead Rising and Lost Planet series, among other Capcom titles – explained that developers and publishers shouldn’t just rely on constantly releasing sequels of established IPs or games in popular genres.
“To be clear, it’s not that games that continue a series or build off an existing famous genre are bad,” he said (via machine translation). “What I mean is that only that is not enough.”
Inafune explained that even though technology has changed massively in the 38 years he’s been in the games industry, the desire to make a hit has always been important, but so too should be the desire to look beyond that hit to figure out what’s next.
“If you make a hit, yes, you’ve succeeded, but it can also place a tremendous burden on you,” he explained. “Does success always seem like a good thing? It is good. You can’t succeed when you’re in an state of anxiety – you need confidence, and that confidence requires a foundation. A past success can provide that foundation.
“But few people who succeed once go on to succeed again. Success brings positive effects, but it also brings side effects. I’ve seen many people who cling only to past success. They cling to how things were done at that time and adopt a defensive attitude.”
While Inafune mainly focused on the Mega Man series for a while, he was also involved in other Capcom games during that period including Breath of Fire, DuckTales and Capcom’s Gold Medal Challenge ’92.
Over time he also worked on Mega Man spin-offs, taking the series into new genres with games like Mega Man: Battle & Chase, Mega Man Battle Network and The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, before moving onto other series entirely.
“In the games industry many people have succeeded once and that’s it, haven’t they?” he asked. “How often did their sequels succeed too? I don’t want to boast, but I take pride in having many representative works – not just Mega Man, but Lost Planet, Onimusha, Dead Rising and so on. The genres were diverse too. Because I didn’t rest on past successes.”
Inafune explained that when he started at Capcom in the ’80s and ’90s making something original was almost taken for granted, because there weren’t yet established tropes like Monster Hunter-type, Resident Evil-type or Mega Man-type games.
These days, however, Infaune believes the industry has reached the stage where everyone is taking a defensive stance, and opting to make games with a higher chance of success.
While he conceded that releasing the 11th game in a series or the 13th game in an established IP may be the correct decision from a business standpoint, he asked whether this would still be the right path five or 10 years down the line.
Suggesting to the Korean developers in attendance that they should start focusing on console game development, Inafune explained that if, in five or 10 years time, the Korean games market was still mainly made up of ‘safe’ mobile games and online games, it should be questioned whether that’s a good thing.
