Capcom: All games will be social in the future

Despite the fierce resistance of a segment of gamers, the inclusion of social elements in games is increasingly more common. In an interview published on their own website, Capcom, through Kazunori Sugiura (who oversees all online games and social applications), said that in their opinion all games will be “basically social” at some point.

The definition of social games is different from person to person. One may think that gacha (the mechanism of selling random in-game items) is synonymous with social games, and another may think that social games are card battles. At Capcom, we define social games as means for facilitating communication among users and something in which game elements and monetization are involved. From this standpoint, we think that all games will be basically social in future.

In the next-generation home video game consoles, users are more and more closely linked to each other online, as in mobile devices and personal computers. I think games in the future will be required to be social in some way.

The good news is that they don’t equate social games with a definite genre, such as card battles; the bad news is that they believe monetization to be necessarily involved in them. I can quite easily accept that almost every game will have some online functionality to connect with other gamers, compare scores and interact in many different and interesting ways; however, I believe that some genres are seriously harmed if their basic elements are linked with monetization.

At any rate, Sugiura reckons that Capcom creators aren’t preemptively limited by a certain platform in their process:

As game creators, we come up with an exciting game and then determine which platform is best suited for it, instead of thinking, “It’s a social game so let’s make it for smartphones”. I think the market is evolving this way.

Do you see a grim future for games because of this trend, or are people just overreacting?