Okami was a critical success, but also a huge commercial flop: here’s how much it sold at launch

It is well known that Okay did not turn out to be the box office hit Capcom had hoped for, despite acclaim from international critics and gamers, leading to the closure of Clover Studio. Now Hideki Kamiya has offered an estimate of the copies sold at launch on PS2 in 2006which are actually a very low number, so much so that in his opinion it was a “huge failure“.

“Okami, too, sold out 150,000 units“The initial shipment was 90,000 units. It was a huge failure. If it had been successful, Clover probably would have continued to exist,” Kamiya said in a chat with Ikumi Nakamura, the game’s environment artist, posted on YouTube.

In the current market, 150,000 copies for a title of a certain caliber like Okami would be unsatisfactory for any publisher. Fortunately, these numbers have improved over time, also thanks to the remastered versions published in the following years on practically every modern platform. To date, Capcom’s official data speak of 4.3 million copies sold, which in any case are not that many if compared to the extremely positive opinions of the players on the title.

Clover Studio was a “weak” team for Kamiya

In the same video, Kamiya also talked about Clover Studio, a team founded in 2004 using as a base the “Team Viewtiful” creator of Viewtiful Joe and closed in 2006 after having created Okami and God Hand (another commercial flop). According to him, in Capcom’s initial plans there was the will to assemble a sort of “dream team” with the company’s most talented developers, but that the result was the exact oppositealthough there was no shortage of very competent people.

“Okami was supposed to be Clover Studio’s flagship title. That’s why we wanted to create a dream team. It was supposed to be a dream team with all the best collaborators from each section. That was the plan, but frankly I think in the end it was a weak team. It doesn’t apply to everyone but as a team as a whole,” Kamiya said.

“It wasn’t a dream team. There were some very drastic contrasts within. There were definitely people without whom there would be no Okami. These members really shone. Some of them really shone more than those I had worked with before. I don’t say this out of flattery, but you Nakamura certainly did that. Naoki Katakai and Keniichirou Yoshimura, Sawaki Takeyasu, Mari Shimazaki, Hiroshi Yamaguchi. I’m really grateful to you, but when considered as a whole, it wasn’t a dream team.”

The video, which you can find above, was published by the YouTube channel of UNSEEN, a studio of which Ikuri Nakamura is CEO and creative director, currently working on Kemuri, an online action game with supernatural elements.