How Rare is Pragmata Really?

All the way back in 2020, Capcom’s Pragmata was among the very first games announced for the then-upcoming PlayStation 5. The trailer was vague, earning comparisons to Death Stranding not for anything in particular within the trailer but for the fact that nobody really knew what was going on. That worked in the game’s favour, though. At the very least, it was a brand new IP from Capcom, a company that around then was riding the success of a handful of tentpoles rather than branching off into new territory.

Being a new IP has therefore dominated all discussion of Pragmata, albeit partly because there hadn’t been much else to talk about for a long time owing to numerous delays. One line of inquiry was to ask if this really was a new IP or if it was actually a secret Mega Man reboot. This theory is kind of hilarious and I’m not going to dwell on it, but suffice to say Mega Man fans are starving. A very common line is that new IP from Capcom are rare, but this claim has been taken at face value perhaps a little too much. After all, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess was also a brand new IP, and that was released just last year. Of course, it was also revealed only a year in advance, three years after Pragmata was unveiled, so I can see why people would find the chronology a bit confusing.

Nevertheless, let’s look at the last 20 years of Capcom games to see just how many new IP they’ve really created. Here’s a list of every new IP by my reckoning by year, with entries that started a series highlighted in bold. The criteria is that the games need to have been developed internally at Capcom rather than just being published by Capcom, so I apologize in advance for the absence of Asura’s Wrath.

• 2006: God Hand, Okami, Dead Rising, Lost Planet

• 2007: Zack & Wiki

• 2008: N/A

• 2009: N/A

• 2010: Ghost Trick

• 2011: N/A

• 2012: Dragon’s Dogma

• 2013: N/A

• 2014: N/A

• 2015: N/A

• 2016: N/A

• 2017: N/A

• 2018: N/A

• 2019: Shinsenkai

• 2020: N/A

• 2021: N/A

• 2022: N/A

• 2023: Exoprimal

• 2024: Kunitsu-Gami

• 2025: N/A

• 2026: Pragmata

We can draw a few conclusions from this. First, Capcom really came out swinging in 2006. Okami and God Hand were both the products of Clover Studio, a creator-centric team within Capcom that was sadly closed due to their games underperforming. Some of their staff would go on to establish Platinum Games. The other two, Lost Planet and Dead Rising, seemed to be setting the stage for the new generation. The next obvious conclusion is that there was an absolute dearth of new IP coming out of Capcom for about ten years, with only the iOS/Switch game Shinsenkai: Into the Depths breaking it up. The last conclusion is that since then, the pace has picked up a bit. Exoprimal was perhaps a misadventure into live-service shooters, but Kunitsu-Gami was a novel, smaller-budgeted game, and Pragmata is shaping up to be a compelling AAA game.

One must wonder what exactly happened, though. What caused Capcom to retreat from new ideas? The aforementioned Lost Planet and Dead Rising produced ongoing series, but neither proved to be smash hits like Capcom probably wanted. Furthermore, reliable tentpoles like Resident Evil and Street Fighter were running into some problems. Street Fighter IV was getting long in the tooth and Street Fighter X Tekken and Street Fighter V made poor impressions, meanwhile Resident Evil 6 was very far from what the players wanted. It was also around this time that Capcom had been outsourcing some of their development to other studios, in particular studios in North America and Europe. Sometimes this turned out well, such as in 2014’s Strider, but others like DmC: Devil May Cry proved alienating to long-time fans. It would seem, then, that Capcom went back to the drawing board and focused more on their time-tested series and developing them internally. Resident Evil: Biohazard in 2017 and Devil May Cry 5 in 2019 brought their respective series back into the good graces of gamers worldwide, and Monster Hunter World in 2018 finally turned the once-niche series into a global juggernaut. Capcom have been coasting off of the familiar faces since then, and only now do they seem confident enough to try something new again.

That covers it for Capcom’s situation specifically, but the games industry more broadly has systemic problems that will reinforce old IP over new ones. Game development has become more expensive and it takes a lot longer to ship a AAA game, so it’s reasonable to assume most publishers aren’t interested in taking as many risks. It’s easy to see this at Nintendo, for example. They haven’t launched a new tentpole series since Splatoon in 2015. There have been some one-off games, like Arms or the more recent Drag x Drive, but it’s hard to imagine those getting sequels. Aside from that, you’d be hard pressed to find anything other than the lightweight Boxboy series. An original IP from their subsidiary Retro Studios was cancelled so they could take over the struggling Metroid Prime 4. You can find stories like this all over the industry. Risky investments aren’t seen as worth it. It’s no surprise that Capcom have made a killing off of their remakes of some of the most popular Resident Evil games. People like familiarity. Hopefully, Capcom can have a smash hit that reminds people that it’s worth it to try something new.