Capcom Vancouver

~ the eulogy ~

Blue Castle Games was incorporated on 4 July 2004 in Burnaby, British Columbia, with twelve staff and one project. The work was licensed baseball. The Bigs arrived in 2007 and Major League Baseball 2K8 the year after, both published by Take-Two, with a front-office management title alongside them. Competent contract development in a city that had a dozen buildings doing the same thing for somebody else's brand.

The turn came in 2009, when Capcom handed it Dead Rising 2. That was an unusual decision at the time, a Japanese publisher giving one of its own franchises to a Canadian work-for-hire house with a resume made entirely of sports games. It went well enough that Capcom did not wait to see the sales. The acquisition was announced on 15 September 2010, Dead Rising 2 reached shelves nine days after that and went on to sell past two million, and the studio was renamed Capcom Vancouver.

For eight years it was the only development studio Capcom operated outside Japan, and it made one thing. Dead Rising 2: Off the Record in 2011, then Dead Rising 3 in 2013 as an Xbox One launch title, which is as visible as a Canadian work-for-hire studio ever gets. Dead Rising 4 followed at the end of 2016 with Frank West back and a warmer tone, and a mobile Puzzle Fighter came out of the building in 2017.

Dead Rising 4 did not sell. Capcom cut roughly 30 percent of the staff in February 2018 and said the studio would keep going. The closure came seven months after that.

~ the dossier ~

~ the western experiment ~

Capcom spent the late 2000s giving its properties to studios in other countries. Bionic Commando went to GRIN in Sweden, Lost Planet 3 to Spark Unlimited in California, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City to Slant Six in Vancouver, and the Devil May Cry reboot to Ninja Theory in Cambridge. Dead Rising 2 was the same policy, applied to a studio in Burnaby.

Almost none of it worked commercially. GRIN went bankrupt in 2009, several of the others closed or were absorbed, and the games that shipped mostly divided their own audiences. What did work was the opposite bet: Resident Evil 7 in 2017, built in Osaka on an engine Capcom wrote itself, which reset the company's fortunes and set the pattern for everything it has published since. By the time Capcom Vancouver was cut, the strategy that created it had already been abandoned everywhere else.

~ the announcement ~

The statement came on 18 September 2018 and was blunt about the reasoning. Capcom said that after reviewing the titles in development at the Vancouver studio it had decided to cancel those projects and concentrate development of major titles in Japan. The 158 people affected received severance, a small crew stayed until January 2019 to close the place down properly, and the Dead Rising game they had been building was never shown to anyone.

~ the city ~

Vancouver lost studios steadily through that decade. Propaganda Games closed in 2011 and Radical Entertainment was gutted by Activision in 2012. Several of the people displaced by those shutdowns walked into the Capcom building afterward. There is a grave here for Propaganda that describes the first half of that pattern. Capcom Vancouver is the back end of it.

The city recovered as a games town and did not recover these names. Electronic Arts is still there at scale and the visual effects industry next door is enormous. The studios that closed between 2011 and 2018 stayed closed, and Dead Rising's most recent release is a 2024 remaster of the 2006 original, made in Osaka.

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