Capcom finally put a bullet in Resident Evil: Re:Verse but haven't entirely given up on Resident Evil online

Baker Street

I had totally forgotten that Resident Evil Village was in development alongside a new Resident Evil multiplayer game, which (at the risk of yet again inflating my own importance) is perhaps why Capcom have just shut the latter down. As promised earlier this year, Resident Evil Re:Verse is no more. Capcom have burned down the game’s storefront listing, taken a shovel to its DLC pages, and now put a pitchfork through the servers. Run tell the peasantfolk that the beast is finally dead.

When they confirmed the suspension of support, Capcom said that they released Re:Verse back in 2022 to celebrate the original game's 25th anniversary. The game peaked at 2080 concurrent players on Steam, which is not exactly Counter-Strike numbers, but Capcom feel nonetheless that "Resident Evil Re:Verse has served its original, celebratory purpose admirably". Ah, this reminds me of me telling my mother that I had an intimidating persona when nobody showed up for my 16th birthday party.

RE:Verse was a six player third-person shooter featuring a cross-section of nods to older Resident Evils, including the ability to chug a potion and transform into a celebrity baddy such as Resident Evil 7’s chainshear-wielding scruffer Jack Baker. It was the latest in Capcom’s quixotic efforts to make a multiplayer Resi, a quest that has given us such wibbly fare as Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, which Richard Cobbett summarised as “not so much bad as grindingly unenthusiastic”.

I’m not aware of an all-timer multiplayer Resident Evil game but they were getting there with the co-op features for games like Resident Evil 5, and Resident Evil Outbreak – a multiplayer survival game set in Raccoon City – should have been a doozie. In Capcom’s defence, they released that back in primordial 2003, when online was a novelty, and online Japanese games especially had you communicating with the servers by means of a specially trained seagull. I’ve still got my seagull from the dial-up days. He’s running a major publisher now. I won’t tell you which one, but let’s just say that the guano rolls downhill at Ubisoft Inc.

While Re:Verse is most assuredly dead - the fate of 70% of games that have online requirements, according to one study - Capcom continue to chase the tipsy T-viral daydream of Resident Evil multiplayer. According to the most recent round of Resident Evil Requiem developer interviews, they toyed with another online-focussed Resident Evil before moving ahead with Requiem’s premise of being stuck in a hotel with a stampeding hag.