Since Kobayashi joined the Capcom team in 1995, he has worked on fan-favorite projects such as Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, Devil May Cry, and Sengoku Basara.
His initial experience with Capcom was the critically acclaimed Resident Evil, released in 1996 as the first game in the series. Kobayashi worked as a programmer as the title became the best-selling PlayStation game in 1997.
He also worked as a producer on Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry 4, with both games gaining high appraise from the critics. The game industry veteran went on to produce Resident Evil 6, a highly criticized game that received average to poor responses from the game community.
This failure led to him being ousted from the franchise, causing tension between the company and Kobayashi. His most recent role as a video game producer goes back to 2018, in Mega Man 11.
Kobayashi said goodbye to the company he had worked in for more than half of his life with these words:
”After serving 27 years with gratitude, I have departed from Capcom on March 31st, 2022, and will be officially joining NetEase games as a producer.”
On the other side of the coin, the Chinese game company NetEase has been hiring aggressively for some time now, getting ready to branch out into the AAA scene. The game industry giant acquired Toshihiro Nagoshi from Sega in October 2021 and opened Nagoshi Studio in hopes of creating quality titles for consoles.
NetEase also recently opened a new studio in Seattle, the city which also houses the headquarters of Microsoft. The studio is named Jar of Sparks, with Jerry Hook at the helm, the former head of design on Halo Infinite. The team will mainly work on creating narrative-driven action games.
Yoshinori Ono, the former producer of Street Fighter and brand manager of Capcom, also left the company for future endeavors in 2020. These two significant resignations, along with Capcom’s Q1 2022 financial report that indicated a massive decline raises some questions about the company’s near future.
