The company will now rely on 'distributed' and 'outsourced' development



According to FF director Motomu Toriyama, 'large-scale internal development' is not in Square’s future after FFXIII and FFXIII-2

During GDC Taipei, Motomu Toriyama, director of FFXIII and FXIII-2, said that Square Enix plans to avoid large-scale development in the future after its experience with Final Fantasy XIII.

According to him, they didn't use their time well...

“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,” he said. “The breakdown there was 180 artists, 30 programmers, and 36 game designers.”

“With a large-scale development team, we didn’t use our time well,” he said, referring to Final Fantasy XIII. “How do you communicate to everyone in the department what the drive of the game is?

“We decided that we would have a milestone every month, and realized we needed to applied more Western technology and production techniques. We learned this not only from GDC, but also from Eidos,” he said of XIII-2′s development.

“We decided we needed to create more practical milestones, not story-based ones.”
It looks like the publisher will rely on “distributed” and “outsourced” development to meet its targets on time.

Yes, Final Fantasy XIII-2 was released earlier this year, and he said that the team “improved”, but added that “it’s still not enough time to add everything we learn back into the game”.

Looks like Eidos (now Square Enix Europe) will have alot of work ahead.

Check out the full Q/A in the link below.

NEWS SOURCE #1: Square Enix to avoid largescale internal development after Final Fantasy XIII2 (via) Gamasutra
NEWS SOURCE #2: Square-Enix may end large scale internal development after Final Fantasy XIII-2 (via) Gematsu

Our thanks to 'Gauss' for this news item!