Capcom's Great-Looking Current-Gen Sci-Fi Game Will Set The Stage For Great-Looking Next-Gen Sci-Fi Games

By now you must have seen this great footage for Remember Me, an awesome-looking open-world game that Capcom showed off this week at Gamescom.

Believe it or not, this great-looking game is for current-gen consoles: Capcom has it slated for May 2013 release on Xbox 360, PC, and PlayStation 3. This is unusual. We should be getting the new Xbox and PlayStation consoles by the end of 2013, and video game publishers don't often release brand new original pieces of intellectual property at the end of a console cycle. They see it as a bad business practice.

So why release the game for Xbox 360 and PS3? According to Capcom senior producer Mat Hart, the plan is to set Remember Me up for a long life on next-gen consoles.

"The thing is, if you leave it too late into next year, then you are starting to straddle that line where you're starting to move into the next generation consoles," Hart told Joystiq. "And what we wanna do is make sure we launch this on the current generation of consoles, to really sell it in, and establish it as a new IP. And then build the franchise out in line with the new consoles coming out."

Capcom's Christian Svensson made some similar comments in the Capcom Unity forums earlier this week:

"Companies have successfully introduced new IP late in the cycle... God of War is a shining example," he wrote. "New IP is the life's blood of a game company. It's never the lion's share of resources, but a reasonable percentage needs to go into "the new." Without doing so, a company will eventually go into a death spiral. We need to always be innovating and trying new things if we're going to have new franchises for the future."

So expect lots of Remember Me in the future. Unless nobody buys it. Then just pretend it doesn't exist.

Remember Me's plans extend to next-gen consoles, Capcom looking to build 'into a major franchise [Joystiq]