#OKAMI PS2 BUY SOFTWARE#
And when you ask somebody, 'Well, this thing that you've been working on for two years, how would you like to start over and put it on something else?', it probably just sets people off thinking the wrong way."Īlso, only two months after Okami debuted in America to less than stellar sales, Capcom's board of directors elected to dissolve Clover Studio, whose founding members disassociated themselves from Capcom and started an altogether new software house, Seeds. "The prospect of it ever even existing was never on the board, it was never a possibility, it was never contemplated. "The PS2 game was a big labor of love for those guys, and at the time that Okami was started, I don't think anyone at Capcom internally knew much about Wii," said Svensson when asked why the publisher didn't start work on a Wii version right away. But Capcom wasn't hearing it - at least not then. Imagine the possibilities if the analog stick were replaced with a Wii remote, said fans. After all, in addition to employing a cel-shaded style similar to that in Wind Waker, Okami featured a gameplay mechanic called the celestial brush, which enabled players to execute actions in the game world by painting on-screen with the PS2's analog stick. (The same suggestion has been made of the stylish LocoRoco for Sony's handheld - that were it a DS game, it would've been a blockbuster.) So it should come as little surprise that no sooner than Okami was announced for PS2 did Nintendo fans beg and plead for a version designed to take advantage of the Wii controller.
Some critics said from the very beginning that Okami was merely not the right game for the PS2 audience and had it appeared on a Nintendo console, it might have performed better at retail. If you look across the slew of all cel-shaded games, developers sort of have an inside joke, saying, 'Okay, it's cel-shaded - it's going to be sent to die.' Believe it or not, unfortunately the mainstream doesn't react well to the 'games as art' pitch and to do big numbers sometimes you have to tap the mainstream." "I think that the mainstream doesn't see cel-shaded titles as super appealing. But why didn't Okami for PS2 sell even better? "New IP is always hard," says Svensson. We're not shipping 10,000 a month of everything, but from distribution channels, we still get orders of a thousand here, a thousand there, and we're still selling it from the Capcom store. We are still selling PS2 copies of Okami. "It really speaks to the quality and the word of mouth and the effort of places like IGN to get the word out there. Okami's day-one figure was nowhere near that," explains Capcom's vice president of business development and strategic planning, Christian Svensson. "That 270,000 figure is a very organic figure. Of course, it's unfair to compare sales of a new IP with one of Nintendo's biggest guns and it must be noted that while Okami sales aren't epic, demand for the game hasn't entirely fallen off even now. Indeed, even sales of the downplayed GCN version outperformed Capcom's ambitious adventure by a wide margin. By comparison, Twilight Princess, which shares much in common with Okami, quickly became a million-seller on Wii. In fact, since its release in September of 2006, the game has amassed about 270,000 in sales - certainly no retail bomb, but hardly the success story that such a product might have enjoyed. It wasn't the hit that it could and should have been, by all accounts. But when Okami finally released exclusively for PlayStation 2, it only enjoyed mild success.
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