When darling developer Clover was shut down by Capcom corporate, following a string of gorgeous and fun to play games that failed to perform at retail, it smacked of giant corporate entity unjustly squashing its arthouse underdog. In the Gamasutra interview published today, Capcom's Charles Bellfield helps to add clarity to the situation, giving a helpful peek at the structure of the Japanese company that published Viewtiful Joe and Okami.

Bellfied tells Kyle Orland:

Capcom, unlike most other developers, doesn't have dedicated strict boundaries between each of its development teams. We actually have one pool of development talent at Capcom and those individuals are basically assigned based on the timescales of each product we're working on, so everybody does work on a variety of content and games at Capcom... with the exception of Clover [...] it was managed by [Atsushi] Inaba-san, [Shinji] Mikami-san and [Hideki] Kamiya-san, and the three of them were essentially the individuals that made Clover, plus with the team staff they had about 80 people in total.

Our games need to at least break even and add value back to our shareholders, so it's impossible to make games that are not profitable over and over again. What actually happened is Mikami-san, Kamiya-san and Inaba-san chose to leave the company and do something else and the rest of the Clover team was just incorporated back into the rest of Capcom's development talent pool. So in fact, while three individuals left, Clover Studios as a separate entity was merged back into the rest of the Capcom teams and today, still, the talent we had, with the exception of three people, is still remaining at Capcom.

While some could make the argument that three very key figures are no longer in the Capcom camp, it would be a disservice to undermine the work that the other 77 Clover staff did while in their employ. Still, we'll continue to lament the closing of Clover while looking forward to see what SEEDS can come up with.

The rest of the interview should not be missed, as Bellfield talks about a number of interesting subjects, including how community feedback influenced the design of Lost Planet, his take on the AIAS awards and Capcom's exclusion, and the surprise success of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. A very good read. Michael McWhertor

Interview: Capcom Vice President of Marketing Charles Bellfield [Gamasutra]