14 DAY TRIAL // Square Enix will avoid creating big AAA gaming projects in-house and is ready to work with outside companies in order to outsource a large part of development duties.
Motomu Toriyama, the game director who has worked on both Final Fantasy XIII and its XIII-2 sequel, has told the audience at GDC Taipei that, “Within our company, developing on PlayStation for Final Fantasy XIII we required a huge amount of graphical data.”
“At the peak, there were over 200 people working on it. The breakdown there was 180 artists, 30 programmers, and 36 game designers,” he continued.
The huge team meant that both projects faced issues when it came to communicating with one another and then other problems linked to the Quality Assurance process.
The developer says, “We are also thinking that we will not do large-scale internal development any longer. We have a lot of great creators in Square Enix, but for larger-scale development we will be doing more distributed and outsourced development to reach our targets on time.”
Final Fantasy XIII and its sequel were disappointments for Square Enix both in critical and commercial terms and the company seems unsure on how to push the franchise forward.
Toriyama says that one bright spot for Final Fantasy XIII is the solid performance it has seen in Asian markets other than Japan, where it has managed to sell 350,000 copies, which beat the numbers the title has seen in Germany and France.
Even Final Fantasy XIII-2 has managed to sell well and move another 200,000 units.
The Chief Executive Officer of Square Enix has recently admitted that a remake of the best title in the Final Fantasy series, the seventh, will not happen as long as current generation experiences do not deliver better quality.
The company is planning to re-launch the Final Fantasy XIV MMO in late 2012 via a new 2.0 patch.