Capcom’s Community Efforts Backfire With Mega Man Legends 3 Cancellation
By Jared Newman | Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 10:53 am
Capcom enraged some of its biggest fans on Monday when it announced the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3 for Nintendo 3DS.
This wasn’t just an ordinary cancellation. After revealing Mega Man Legends 3 last September, Capcom started soliciting feedback from its community on how to proceed with the game. An online forum allowed fans to communicate with developers as they worked on a prototype, which would eventually become a downloadable prologue to the main game.
Capcom now says that it won’t be releasing the prototype, and will stop updating the game’s development forum.
The announcement stung loyal gamers who had taken a personal interest in Mega Man Legends 3’s development. Essentially, Capcom admitted that the whole point of this back-and-forth with fans was to gauge interest in the finished product. However excited the community seemed, Capcom ultimately felt its resources were better spent elsewhere.
I get that people are upset about the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3–bleeped expletives abound on Capcom’s community blog– but I don’t fault Capcom for the process. In recent years, the publisher has made big efforts to nurture its fans online, with fighting game tournaments, an active blog and some forward-thinking approaches to its intellectual property (notably not suing but endorsing rapper Raheem “Random” Jarbo when he created an album based Mega Man samples). None of this stuff is altruistic, but it’s all admirable.
The development of Mega Man Legends 3 was an extension of Capcom’s community efforts. This time, those efforts backfired because full-scale development was never guaranteed. That may be a drag for the fans who provided input on the game, but people need to remember that video games are a business. Experiments fail and cancellations happen. Capcom, at least, deserves credit for trying a novel, open approach in an industry that’s notorious for keeping secrets.
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July 21st, 2011 at 7:03 am
No. I think not. You forget to mention WHY us Mega Man fans are angry. This is the 3rd game in the year that Mega Man has been canceled. Prototype was complete, and ready to be launched but Capcom held it. They said they would gauge their decision on how many people bought the game on the Eshop, and we never even got that chance. They pulled the plug before hand.
That is why we're angry, Capcom is toying with their fanbase, with "Ultimate MVC3" after 2 single DLC that came with the special edition of the box regardless. I can't see how a Call of Duty Resident Evil Edition is better off than their Maskot, but that's just the fanboy in me talking at that point.
The fact is the Blue Bomber deserved better.
July 21st, 2011 at 9:20 pm
I beg to differ. It was unfair of them to base the fate of the PROTOTYPE, a downloadable prologue that was supposed to have gauged audience potential for the game, on the number of people actively participating on their website (which was a very frustrating site to sign up for, and would have involved a multi-step process for anyone who didn't have an account there to begin with).
Capcom told us that this prototype was essentially the game's chance to prove itself on the market where it mattered and introduce the newest generation of gamers to this charming franchise, and they took that chance away without a second thought.
July 21st, 2011 at 9:49 pm
Ugh, Capcom apologist.
Yes, we understand perfectly well that video games are a business. However, they had no reason to cancel a game where tens of thousands of people were actively saying "Yes Capcom, we will buy your product." Why did they even put all this effort into the development if they were so half-assed about it? Why alienate their most famous character, alongside one of their biggest fan bases? It just reeks of Capcom having some sort of childish grudge against Inafune to me.