Playstation Event on June 4, "Playstation 5 official game reveal" , EDIT Official Sony confirmed it will be June 4

[DonFerrari]

shikamaru317 said:

DonFerrari said:

You are making a very unfair comparison when you try to put copy and paste yearly releases to buff numbers. and have you compared the size of each team? Or you just want to shoot down SE?

You are right that yearly stuff like EA sports and Forza being on the list is a bit unfair. The rest I listed are not copy-paste though, not even CoD, contrary to what some believe about the series (every CoD game but 1 this gen has had an original campaign, mostly original maps, and mostly original guns, very little in CoD has gotten copy-pasted this gen, most of the games have taken place in different time periods which prevented copy-pasting).

As for team sizes, a comparison to other development teams is pretty much impossible because Square doesn’t release any information about the make-up of their development divisions. The only team size out of all the Square JP teams that we know is Luminous Productions, which had 130 devs as of September 2019. We can however compare Square’s overall employee count of 4,600 as of 2019 to other publishers, and it is true that Square is smaller than the 3 big western publishers as well as Take-Two/2K, EA, Activision, and Ubisoft (EA and Activision Blizzard have about twice the employees Square has while Ubisoft has a whopping 16,000, and Take-Two is just slightly bigger than Square), but they are the biggest JP publisher, and also seem to have more devs than Zenimax (Bethesda Parent company which released like 10 AAA games this gen) and Warner Bros. Interactive.

Xxain said:

Terrible Terrible Terrible comparison. 

You comparing Publishers who have a shit ton of studios around the world, who regularly rotate the IP among those studios/ or involve multiple studios for different parts of ONE game to ONE DEVELOPMEMT TEAM! Ubisoft specifically does this! Example Assasin Creed Odysssey was done by Ubisoft Montreal, Quebec and Singapore! That is over 1000 bodies working on 1 game! 

SE has 5 active teams and those teams are responsible for all parts of those projects. Japan has remained very traditional about this.

EDIT: you also are not considering that western development teams tend to focus one IP for the entire gen while Japanese developments teams tend to have multiple IPs they juggle. So you just cant ignore that only one DQ was released when that same team also does Mana games too.

Perhaps, but your argument that 1 AAA game per IP per gen is about the same as other developers is equally as bad, I think I showed that much. Fact is that the vast majority of AAA games are made in 3 or 4 years, and yet in the 8th console generation, which ran from Holiday 2013 to Fall 2020, 7 years, only 1 of Square’s JP development teams has managed to release 2 AAA games, Nomura’s team which released KH3 and FF7 Remake part 1. Square’s other JP development teams only released 1 AAA game or no AAA games during this 7 year gen. That is slower than average for AAA development.

You are right that Square’s JP teams have released a good many smaller AA and A games  this past gen, but it doesn’t change the fact that they haven’t released many AAA games. The other publishers have also released a lot of smaller games after all, while still managing to release more AAA games than Square did. Even ignoring western devs, Capcom pulled off more AAA games than Square this gen, while also releasing at least as many AA and A games as Square released, despite having less developers than Square.

I acknowledged that Square has enough development teams and developers to pull off a lot more AAA games next gen, and job listings suggest that they are going to try to increase AAA development next gen. But I am not going to count my chickens before they hatch. Nobody will be more happy than me to see Square release a lot more AAA games next gen, I truly hope they do, but I’m not going to expect it because that may lead to disappointment.

You also do know that not all AAA is the same size or budget and also it is attached to expected revenue. So saying R* is slow to release games because the only AAA game they released this gen was RDR2 would be quite unfair. Sure SE isn't that profilic when compared to past gens but I wouldn't say they releasing 1 title per team on gen 9 is something crazy. Even 2 titles would be feasible depending on the size and if they share same engine.

Ubi, EA and Activision is several folds bigger than they from what I know. And even if you say every CoD is different (won't dispute it since I don't play) a 4-6h campain is a lot shorter than a 40-100h campain that SE games generally offer.

From what I remember you are cutting out the 3 Tomb Raiders, 1 FF (14 is still updated regularly) and probably some other titles.

EDIT - https://www.giantbomb.com/square-enix/3010-104/published/

Marvel Avengers, Dying Light 1 and 2, FFVIIR Part 1, FF XV, FF XIV, KH3, DQ11, Just Cause 3 and 4, Tomb Raider Reboot 1 2 and 3, Nier Automata (even if outsourced), Deus Ex, Murdered Soul Suspect, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (still big even if bad), Thief, FF XIII Lighting Returns (if we want to count 7 years instead of current gen only), 

This seems quite more than you had listed before, besides a plethora of smaller games.

Last edited by DonFerrari - on 29 May 2020