Mobile games to spur Capcom's profits

Capcom, the Japanese video games maker famous for its "Resident Evil" series, is betting on mobile users on platforms such as Apple's iOS and Google's Android to continue downloading its games titles and, in turn, grow mobile games' contribution of the company's profits to about 30 percent.

Bloomberg reported on Friday that Capcom had forecasted in May that mobile games would make up 6.6 percent of the company's operating profits in the year ending March. Its chairman, Kenzo Tsujimoto, told the news agency this proportion would probably increase about five-fold in the next few years.

"The gaming population is expanding thanks to the rising popularity of applications played with smartphones. We hope these casual users will eventually start to play games on video-game consoles [too]," Tsujimoto added in the report.

Capcom, which started the Beeline Interactive brand for its social games arm this year, had introduced "Smurf's Village" for iOS devices with significant success. The title has already garnered more than 15 million downloads via Apple's App Store, the company noted. It also began offering the game to Android users last month.

Reuters said the company is also building up its line of games played on Facebook and other social networking sites, as Japan's US$10.6 billion video-games market is set for an upheaval. The domestic market for social games will almost triple to 305 billion yen (US$4 billion) in 2013, noted Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities in the report.