Hideaki Itsuno, a veteran Capcom developer and director behind Devil May Cry and Dragon’s Dogma, has numerous dream projects tumbling around in his brain. The iconic game developer, who left Capcom to head up LightSpeed Studios Japan, unfortunately won’t create his personal passion projects because they won’t sell.
Speaking to Japanese outlet Famitsu, and translated by Automaton, Itsuno explained that the games he’s “most like to make probably wouldn’t sell”. One of the game director’s prior pet projects was the aforementioned Dragon’s Dogma which initially didn’t sell well when it released in 2012. However, these long-ruminated ideas may be even wilder than that title.
“They’d be too out there to be judged as commercially viable. I am well aware of this myself, so instead, I extract specific elements from those game ideas and combine them with elements I know from experience will work. That’s how I’m building our new title.”
Itsuno explained that he always pushes some of his craziest ideas into the mix of more commercially viable ones, but he doesn’t believe he’ll ever get the chance to work on some of his more far out ideas.
“Whenever I’m asked to propose new projects, I usually submit five or six ideas and mix in about two that I really want to do, but they never get chosen,” the game director told the outlet.
At the time of writing, not much is known about the Devil May Cry director’s next game. In development at LightSpeed Japan, Itsuno’s next major release is described as a “AAA, singleplayer-focused action game targeting the global market”.
In a post on Twitter, the director announced: “A new project has already started. We will do our best to announce it to everyone as soon as possible. We are also looking for people to join us in developing the game”.
“I’m excited to be creating a new AAA title with an amazing team and delivering a beautiful and innovative experience to players around the world,” he said in a separate post.
