Capcom Wanted to Make Resident Evil 7 a Live-Service Game With Micro-Transactions

In an attempt to head back to series roots, 2017 survival horror game Resident Evil 7: Biohazard by developer/publisher Capcom moved away from its more action-oriented direction in games like Resident Evil 5 and 6 for an overall revamp.

Although it all worked out and Resident Evil 7 became a massive success, Capcom originally had plans for a live-service game with online multiplayer and micro-transactions, said RE7 executive producer Jun Takeuchi recently in an interview.

Takeuchi sat down with Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami in a discussion on official Biohazard YouTube channel lately, talking about how Capcom was pressuring RE7 dev team to include few feature like multiplayer and micro-transactions.

When they eventually asked Takeuchi to join team, those plans were scrapped as they decided to go back to roots of survival horror. He talked with game director Koshi Nakanishi about what they are about to do before starting the project.

During that time at Capcom, there was a big marketing push for making games that players are asking for. Directors were being pushed for including aspects like downloadable content, online multiplayer, live-service and micro-transactions.

Capcom basically wanted a Resident Evil game that features all these elements, making a lot of demands from directors. Company president Kenzo Tsujimoto heard about these ruined efforts and realized Resident Evil 7 is in very bad shape.

So, he called in Takeuchi to help devs make it and that is how he became an executive producer for RE7. He pushed Capcom to bring in Nakanishi as game director before trying to remove live- service and micro-transaction features they had.

They all decided to explore Resident Evil series roots in horror and quickly killed off concepts of a multiplayer mode. Dev team could've made an exciting horror multiplayer if they could put it together but didn't have any ideas for it anyway.

Resident Evil veterans Shinji Mikami and Jun Takeuchi recently sat down reflecting on 25 Years of series debut.

Resident Evil VII: Biohazard ended up being a nightmare for marketing team as a regular single-player horror game. However, it all turned out great with an outstanding Metacritic score of 86 and sold over 11 million copies worldwide so far.

Capcom recently launched next-gen upgrade for Resident Evil 7 along with Resident Evil 2 and 3 Remake on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, adding improved frame-rates, ray tracing and 4K support for across current-generation system.