Devil May Cry 5 Exists Because of Fan Demand

Ask, and you shall receive. Or demand for years on Internet message boards and in social media comment sections, and you shall receive, eventually.

According to Capcom, Devil May Cry 5 was "born because that's what the fans want."

The Devil May Cry series seemed shelved by Capcom as the hack-and-slash genre continued to lose mainstream appeal in the marketplace. And after 2013's effort by contracted developer Ninja Theory, DmC: Devil May Cry, failed to hit the mark, it looked like it could be awhile before we saw another entry in the beloved series.

However, rumors started to ravage the Internet of not only a new Devil May Cry game, but a fifth mainline entry in the series. Some gobbled up the rumors as the only hope they had, while others simply dismissed them. Then at E3 2018 earlier this year, Capcom unveiled Devil May Cry 5. And it was one of the talks of the show after years of anticipation, waiting, and months of gestating in the rumor mill.

And what was fueling the excitement for the fifth entry for a series in an apparently dying genre? That Capcom was clearly deciding to focus the game chiefly on its core players, making the game they had been demanding for years.

"The last game was very good, but there were a few unhappy voices because it wasn't a direct sequel and other things," said Capom's Marketing Director Antoine Molant. "Because of that, the dev team sat down and asked: 'Where do we take that next?' And it was known that the community wanted Devil May Cry 5 to be closer to 1, 2 and 3. And so the project was born.

"We can debate whether that genre has the same appeal as it used to... that's hard to say. The project was born because of what the fans want."

COO, Stuart Turner adds:

"It's fair to say that we are very focused on the audience and the feedback that we get. We have seen some horrible stories in the media recently about publishers bending to the will of the Internet. We wouldn't advocate going that far. But certainly there is an element of fan service that runs throughout the company.

"DMC is an example of that. Fans weren't happy, so therefore we went a different way. It's part of giving back within the remit that we're still a business, we still need it to sell. We want to give things to the fans, we want to support them, but it has to make sense. So we do it within reason. We don't listen to the far extremes of the fanbase, shall we say."

However, while Devil May Cry 5 is for the fans, Molant notes that the project still would have never been greenlit on fan demand alone, it had to make business sense as well. And apparently it did, because as the marketing director points out, the Devil May Cry fanbase is still "quite big."

Devil May Cry 5 is in development for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It is slated to release sometime in March 2019. For more on the game, click here.

Source: GamesIndustry