Niantic’s Monster Hunter Now pitch took ten minutes

Niantic walked into Capcom's office and made a deal in record time

Niantic

In Japanese culture, business relationships are usually cultivated over a long period. It’s almost like dating. The prospective business partner must be showered in gifts and taken out for meals before they sign on the dotted line. For Monster Hunter Now, Capcom’s Ryozo Tsujimoto said yes within the first ten minutes of the pitch. 

Monster Hunter Now is the latest game from Niantic, creator of Pokemon Go. It melds Monster Hunter with its usual geolocation gameplay, asking you to walk around in real life to find monsters that you’ll battle for crafting materials. 

It’s a lot more involved than Pokemon Go, asking you to dodge, block, and attack, with multiple weapons with their own quirks. 

Niantic’s chief product officer Kei Kawai wanted to connect people as they work together to take down giant beasts, transplanting the camaraderie of Monster Hunter’s main series into the real world in the way the classic PSP game used to bring people together. His cousin found his wife through Monster Hunter on PSP and he wanted to create those same bonds with the modern audience.  

“So we went to the pitch [saying], ‘Hey, we would like to work on a Monster Hunter game set in the real world’,” Kawai says. “And so I sat down with him, shared slides, started talking – and it was a first pitch… Like 10 minutes into that, he was like, ‘Let's do it’. 

“He told me there's a lot of fans telling him they want to play Niantic [style] games, and if they're gonna work with anyone in making a real-world game, it's gonna be Niantic. So I was surprised. I imagined that it's gonna take a lot of eating and drinking and talking to get anything done In Japanese business.” 

We recently attended the Monster Hunter Now Carnival in Toyko and saw the first in-person realization of Niantic’s mission statement.