For those too young to remember, Capcom’s Onimusha franchise during the PS2 era was one of the company’s most popular titles. Despite the fact that the last game,Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, released in 2006 was well recieved by critics it didn’t sell as much as Capcom had anticipated.
The decline in the franchises sales since the first 2 games is one of the reason why Capcom is hesitant in revisiting the series, according to Capcom’s vice president of strategic planning & business development, Christian Svensson.
“When you look at the timing and sales trend of how Onimusha has gone each outing – I won’t give you the exact numbers, but let’s just say every outing subsequently has been about 60% of the prior – the brand doesn’t right now have quite the resilience that you might think.” Svensson told IGN. “While Onimusha 1 and Onimusha 2 are among our more successful titles, Onimusha 3 and Onimusha Dawn of Dreams, not so much,” he added.
Maybe the reason for the decline in sales was the fact that the last 2 Onimusha games moved in a rather different direction than the first 2 titles. Svensson didn’t rule out another entry in the series though.
“For the time being I think it’s in percolate mode, that is to say, it’s not forgotten internally, there are discussions that go on, but I don’t think anyone has sort has come up with the ‘that’s it’ idea of how to get the game back up to 3 or 4 million units.” Svensson noted “You may see some things of the brand pop up in the future, I can’t say what, but there are certainly discussions about it.”
