A fascinating backstory for Resident Evil 7 has emerged: Jun Takeuchi of Capcom revealed in a recent interview that the game was initially planned as a live service with microtransactions, but the idea changed after Takeuchi persuaded the publisher to go a different route.
Takeuchi claims that Capcom initially put much pressure on the development team, with the marketing department constantly providing input, leaving the producer and game director with little creative freedom.
“When we started working on Resident Evil 7 we went back to that ‘what is horror anyway?’ discussion,'' Takeuchi says in the interview, ''I talked about it a lot with Nakanishi – We’d talked about that stuff even before starting work on Resident Evil 7, actually..''
“And right around that time there was a big push at Capcom, a big marketing push, saying we have to make the games players are asking for. So we were being told to make this, make that, it was really hard on the directors at the time. Online multiplayer this, downloadable content that. Ongoing service games! Microtransactions! Make a Resident Evil game that ticks all those boxes!''
“First, we decided that Resident Evil’s roots are in horror. We talked about it a lot. The idea of multiplayer got killed off pretty quickly. If we could properly put it together we could make an exciting horror multiplayer game, but we didn’t really have any good ideas so we set it aside.''
“We went down the list, chopping them out until we had marketing’s worst nightmare – a regular old single-player horror game. That’s what we ended up with.”
Resident Evil 7 was released in January 2017 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, followed by a cloud version for the Nintendo Switch in May 2018 in Japan, and PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions in June 2022.
Do you think the iconic horror franchise would work as a live service game? Let us know in the comments!
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