Clover Vets Open SEEDS, Capcom Clears The Air

Last week, the designers who used to head Capcom's Clover Studios (makers of Viewtiful Joe, Okami, and God Hand) announced that they were forming a new studio named SEEDS. Clover principles Atsushi Inaba, Hideki Kamiya, and Shinji Mikami are looking to make some 'preposterously amazing' games. People upset by Clover's closing, though, should know that most of the studio is back inside Capcom. In a Gamasutra article with Capcom Vice President of Marketing Charles Bellfield, he makes it a point to say: "Capcom, unlike most other developers, doesn't have dedicated strict boundaries between each of its development teams. We actually have one pool of development talent at Capcom and those individuals are basically assigned based on the timescales of each product we're working on ... the rest of the Clover team was just incorporated back into the rest of Capcom's development talent pool. So in fact, while three individuals left, Clover Studios as a separate entity was merged back into the rest of the Capcom teams and today, still, the talent we had, with the exception of three people, is still remaining at Capcom."

Should horticulturalists not open seeds?

[Timesprout]

And let the vets get on with neutering pets?

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[captain_cthulhu]

hahaha, like little viewtiful squirrels preparing for a long winter...

You know what they say about horticulture

[Anonymous Coward]

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

Posting anonymously because, well, would you want your name associated with this joke?

SEEDs again?

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Don't we have enough damn seed based names? Not to mention this is way too close to Gundam SEED to be ignored.

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[jrwr00]

or in Trigun, the SEEDS Project

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[Anonymous Coward]

Face it, seeds will always be superior to easily sabotaged feeds.

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[mjhacker]

Better yet, SEED cadets in Final Fantasy VIII...

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[NonSequor]

I think you mean Ploject Seeds.

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[Spazntwich]

Well, yeah, if there's one way to get downmodded, it's trash talking Nintendo in articles that have nothing to do with Nintendo.

Re:Nintendo never at fault!

[HappySqurriel]

I make factual comments about the stupid Wii and my karma gets bumped down to terrible. WTF! The system is a pathetic excuse for a game console. All the games suck that are out for it. If you took away the crappy tacked on controls they would barely score over a 40/100. If any of those games were on any other systems they would get shot down. "Don't you dare talk about nintendo in a bad way or you will go to hell!" -quote from idiotic nintendo fans.

Please note, your opinion does not count as fact so the statements you're making are not factual comments ... Had you said "In my opinion, the system is a pathetic excuse for a game console." people probably would have been a little bit nicer to you ...

The only thing I can say that is really fact is that there are lots of people who would disagree with you because the Wii is exactly what they are looking for in a game console; many people are not looking for uber-realism and are just looking for an fun way to spend some time.

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[revlayle]

OMG

Don't you dare talk about nintendo in a bad way or you will go to hell!

Doesn't let Capcom off the hook

[Matchstick]

It's shortsighted to view a successful team as solely a collection of "human resources" to be broken up and spread around among projects. Smoothly functioning teams don't appear by magic when you throw a bunch of resources together; it takes time, and sometimes they don't appear at all.

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[Taulin]

But that is how most Japanese companies work. When you interview for a job, you don't interview for a position, but rather for the company. In every major company (Canon, Fuji, Nissan, etc), this holds true, and you may be an accountant one year, and doing programming the next.

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[MeanderingMind]

Regardless, the criticism holds.

You can argue that breaking up Clover was not bad, as many of its recent games were not received as well as they might have been. However, there is room to be skeptical about the practice in general.

The perception is, and is sometimes true, that teams with great synergy are broken up and divided amongst other groups by the callous processes of HR. Whether or not this is standard practice is not the issue, whether or not this is good practice is.

There's nothing wrong with the

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[Taulin]

I totally agree. I only tell people about this just to see the culture shock they go through. Even at my 'day job' we are working with a major Japanese client, and they found our non-component approach interesting. The people they sent over here to work with us were never part of the components they came over to support. Totally ridiculous. Between this, and having worked over there several years doing contract work, it amazes me that they are able to make what they do. They are good, smart people, an

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[Dutch Gun]

It's not just Japanese companies that miss the big picture regarding group dynamics.

At a multi-studio game company I worked for a few years ago, I was part of a successful new studio that got broken up in part because they wanted to redistribute our personnel. Ironically, we ended up being victims of our own success. The management got it into their head that they could improve the overall quality of the other studios by breaking up our groups and redistributing it throughout the company.

Still, it wasn't

I played a great Capcom game last night...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I played a great Capcom game last night...Ghost and Goblins for the NES8 on an emulator. I remember when these guys were like the #2 or #3 game provider for the NES8 in the 1980s - anyone know how are they doing today?

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[MeanderingMind]

All I know is that after Mega Man X, I stopped playing Mega Man games. X was awesome, but something about the sequels lost me. Legends was interesting but ultimately came down to endlessly strafing every boss and enemy in the game. I honestly can't say anything about the handheld games.

Call me old fashioned, but I really just want an old style Mega Man game with 8 Robot masters.

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[jfodale]

How about Bionic Commando? I don't own a Wii, and currently have no plans to, but if there were to be a Bionic Commando game on the Wii... good lord, the sheer awesomeness would be astounding.

Summary Grammar Alert

[drinkypoo]

Clover principles Atsushi Inaba, Hideki Kamiya, and Shinji Mikami

Clover principals. This is one of the trickier homonyms in the English language because their meanings are so very similar. Principle can mean primary so it does seem like it makes sense to use it here. However, principal is the word we're looking for here: "a chief or head."[1]

Slashdot: Where the users suggest the stories, and are the only ones doing any editing...

[1] "principal." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 20

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[minus_273]

I heard the Atsushi Inaba principle is a corner stone of capcom development.

it's an adjective phrase...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also common in English to shorten an adjective phrase to contain only its adjective, at least in informal use. This is especially true for a common or well-understood adjective phrase such as "principle players" or "principle members".

You are correct to state that "principal" and "principle" are difficult homonyms, but you have misidentified this particular situation as an example of homonym substitution. More likely the writer was merely truncating the adjective phrase.

Team dissolved

[AceJohnny]

I believe there is magic in a good team: synergy. This means that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

I regularly see examples of small teams of 5 people outperforming the 40-person team (of course, communication overhead grows very quickly).

Anyhow, with that in mind, Capcom's declaration does not reassure me at all. You can't just "assign" someone to a project and expect to see that project get the same boost as the assignee's previous.

They've kept most of the people, but they've very probably d