New Dead Rising Getting Scaled Down Due to Capcom Vancouver Layoffs
Capcom is laying off a significant number of the Capcom Vancouver team. They’re aiming to both streamline the company somewhat, and also reduce the scope of the new Dead Rising game that the team has been working on. This also means that they had to cancel an unnamed project that was still in the earliest stages.
It seems that a lot is happening in Capcom Vancouver. They are the studio behind Dead Rising 2, 3, and 4, as well as some mobile games. According to an anonymous source that spoke to Kotaku, fifty people were fired from the team. The reason behind the firings is streamlining the company, and lowering the scope of the new Dead Rising. As a result of this, an unnamed and unannounced project had to be canceled.
According to the report, Capcom Vancouver had 250 employees before the layoffs. This means that the team is now a fifth of the manpower down, which is pretty scary. Apparently, the new Dead Rising game that the team has been working on was “over-scoped and under-staffed”. So, like we’ve mentioned, the layoffs aren’t just about restructuring the company, but also to help reign the project in a bit. I guess it’s not a bad idea to shrink everything into a more manageable workload. Hopefully, the restructuring of the project and the team will leave the developers with something much more manageable. If they still end up under-staffed, then all the layoffs would have been for nothing.
As for the poor, unnamed game that got canceled, don’t weep for it too much. The report notes that the project didn’t even get the green light yet; just an early prototype that will now probably never see the light of day. It was supposed to be “a third-person action-adventure game set in an alternate reality version of New York.” That’s everything we know about it, and will likely ever know.
