Square Enix: exclusivity war is officially over; LA studio to go DLC
Big things up for Square Enix! They’ve just set up shop in LA, and in an interview, SE US president John Yamamoto has confided their plans: the LA studio is going digital. He also revealed the general direction the corporation is going – global markets and what not. But in what could be called as one of the boldest statements ever made in the industry, he’s already declaring the exclusivity war officially over. Like whoa.
So. Square Enix has finally set up shop in Los Angeles. I’m sure some of you are getting ideas now – wanna apply, eh? Well, whether you fancy having Square Enix US president John Yamamoto as your higher up or not, it pays to know what direction the company is charting for the future.
Going 1s and 0s. With the new LA studio in its infancy stage, the bosses want this new branch of theirs to start relatively small: downloadable titles. Speaking to an interview with GamesIndustry, John Yamamoto reveals that DLC games are the way to go (for now):
All formats – Xbox Live, WiiWare, PlayStation Network – are all viable formats for us. We started the in-house development team a couple of months ago and we’re starting with downloadable content because the team is still small.
Gradually, I want to expand that team, and also evaluate lots of middleware, because western middleware is much more advanced compared to Japanese middleware. So we will study and feed back information to Square Enix in Japan.
(By the way, if you are interested in sending in your resume to the LA studio, apparently, they’re currently working with a skeleton crew of three members – whoa! – and that they hope to expand to as much as thirty staffers within a year.)
Doing a MySpace, only with devs. LA studio besides, it looks like Square Enix is starting to broaden its horizons. After The Last Remnant‘s use of the Unreal Engine 3 (a first for SE!), the company is now looking at forging stronger alliances with other devs in the west. And just recently, they got rights from Gas Powered Games to pick up Supreme Commander 2.
I think itÂ’s always good to introduce new ideas, techniques, and processes into the company in order to stay on the cutting edge. The Last Remnant was the first time we had built a game using an outside development engine, and it taught our developers to find new and creative solutions in order to achieve their objectives.
We’re not only working with Gas Powered Games, we’re also contacting multiple studios in England, other European countries, and the US and Canada. We’re talking with other studios right now.
We are interested in studios that have their own established IP and we’re also interested in creating new IP as well.
And finally we have this…
Platform-exclusivity. A dead thing. They’ve started with FF13… Is the time for platform exclusive officially over? According to Yamamoto, platform-exclusivity is really a thing of the past now.
I really believe so. Not so long ago the PS2 dominated the market so if we developed an exclusive game for PS2 then we could enjoy a very good profit. But that time is already over. To maximise and spread our games to as many users as possible I think we have to go to multiformat – the Xbox 360, PS3 and also the PC as well.
The Japanese market is very strong and back when we could concentrate on developing games for just one console, business was very good. But the one-console market is over
Ooh, some pretty bold statements there. I’d be quite interesting to see how Square Enix will be keep to these plans.
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