Capcom sold over 100k copies of its games in Russia last year despite suspending its operations

Capcom has disclosed the geography of its game sales for the past fiscal year. Although the company has suspended its business activities in Russia, the country was still in the same tier as Canada, Italy, and France.

Street Fighter 6

Earlier this month, Capcom celebrated its 40th anniversary by sharing some stats on its global business. It also launched Capcom Town, a website where fans can visit a virtual museum and learn some facts about the publisher’s core franchises.

According to a dedicated page published on the Capcom website, the company has sold roughly 500 million units of its games over the last 40 years. It once again highlighted the previously shared lifetime sales of its main series: Street Fighter (49 million copies), Resident Evil (142 million), and Monster Hunter (92 million).

But the most interesting part is a map showing the geography of Capcom’s sales. It contains information on countries where the company sold the most units during the past fiscal year ended March 31, 2023.

As can be seen above, the US, China, Japan, UK, Germany, Brazil, and Argentina were the main contributors as the countries with sales above 1 million units. But Capcom also sold over 100k copies of its games in Russia, although its titles are not officially available there.

Just like many other global publishers, Capcom suspended the sales of its games in Russia in March 2022, shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine. However, it is worth noting that the Japanese publisher didn’t make any official statements regarding this decision.

Russian players currently can’t legally purchase Capcom games on Steam or any other official stores. This applies to both titles released before February 24 and new products such as Resident Evil 4 and Street Fighter 6.

One way for local users to bypass these restrictions is to buy region-free Steam keys on third-party platforms or to purchase physical copies of console games brought into the country through grey import channels. So this is probably where those 100k+ units came from.

It is unclear how many units of Capcom games were sold in Russia in FY21, so it is hard to compare how the sales suspension affected the company’s revenue in the region.

According to the image above, Russia was among 23 countries with sales above 100k units. The list also includes Canada, Mexico, Australia, France, Spain, Italy, and Poland.