Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 were very cumbersome projects for Square Enix, they chose to develop the games internally and wound up with a lot of unnecessary wasted time and money by the time they were finished. Because of this, they have chosen not to try developing large-scale projects internally anymore. Instead, games on the scale of Final Fantasy XIII will be outsourced to other companies.
“We are also thinking that we will not do large-scale internal development any longer,” director Motomu Toriyama (pictured above) told the GDC Taipei crowd. ”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.”
Square Enix crippled the development of Final Fantasy XIII by trying to keep all information regarding it in secret, and the result is that they were unable to test until far later into stages of development than what would be ideal. Toriyama said that, in the future, Square Enix plans to make use of Western game development techniques, and to generally be more sensible with the goals of their projects.
Source: Gamasutra
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2 comments on this post.
I was worried when I read the title at first. I thought they meant they would make Final Fantasy a more western game. Still, outsourcing? That hasn’t really proved well in the past.
Well to be fair, some good examples of outsourcing by Japanese devs include Dead Rising 2 and the Super Smash Bros. games which Nintendo usually brings in many other studios to work on. There’s also the new DmC game which I think is looking quite good and like a whole new experience thanks to a brand new developer.