Clover Studio

~ the obit ~

Clover Studio was incorporated on 1 July 2004 as a Capcom subsidiary, built out of Capcom Production Studio 4. The point of it was structural rather than creative. Atsushi Inaba ran it as president with Hideki Kamiya and Shinji Mikami as the creative leads, and the arrangement was supposed to give them room to start original work without arguing it through the parent company every time.

The catalog is short. Viewtiful Joe and its sequel came across from Production Studio 4, along with two spin-offs on GameCube and DS. Then in 2006 the studio put out Okami in April and God Hand in September, both in Japan, both on a PlayStation 2 that was already into its last full year as a current machine.

Both were reviewed as significant, Okami especially: an adventure rendered as moving Japanese ink painting, with a brush you drew on the screen with. Neither sold. Okami moved 66,000 copies in Japan across 2006 and had still not passed 600,000 worldwide by March 2009. God Hand did around 60,000 in Japan in its first months.

The PlayStation 2 was everywhere in Turkey and almost none of it came through Sony. You bought the console with a chip already in it and you bought games as copied discs from a shop that stocked whatever moved. That catalog was a mirror of what sold in America and Europe, which means a commercial failure never entered it. Okami was not on the shelf here, and nobody decided against it. The pirate market has the same taste as the retail market it is copying from. I met the name years later, once it had already become a thing people said had been ignored.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the numbers ~

Capcom announced the dissolution on 12 October 2006, with the wind-up set for the end of its fiscal year in March 2007. The press language was about concentrating management resources and improving development efficiency across the group, which is the standard phrasing for a subsidiary that did not pay for itself.

The order of events is worth keeping straight, because most retellings compress it. Inaba and Kamiya had already left Capcom before the announcement and Mikami stayed on a special contract, with Seeds Inc. formed in August 2006, so the studio was hollow by the time Capcom said anything in public. Okami's Western release that September and God Hand's in October both went out from a company that had already finished internally.

~ the funny part ~

Okami's afterlife is now more than six times longer than the studio's life and still running. It was ported to Wii in 2008 and remastered in HD twice, once for PlayStation 3 in 2012 and again in 2017 for everything current, and it has been selling steadily the whole time to people who were not born when Clover closed.

In December 2024 Hideki Kamiya announced a sequel at The Game Awards, in production at a new studio called Clovers with Capcom involved. That is eighteen years after the parent company decided the first one was not worth continuing.

~ what came after ~

Seeds Inc. merged with ODD Incorporated in October 2007 to form PlatinumGames, which made Bayonetta in 2009 and Nier: Automata in 2017 and became one of the few Japanese studios with a house style you can recognize from a screenshot.

Mikami went a different way, founding Tango Gameworks in 2010. ZeniMax bought it almost immediately and Microsoft got it with ZeniMax, then announced its closure in May 2024, then Krafton bought it a few months later. Mikami himself had left in 2023, before any of that. The pattern following all of these people is the same one: the work keeps finding a buyer and the company keeps not surviving.

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