First of all, hi
Now, to the business- i think that Square just resembles how japannesse software development has become stagnant since a couple of years ago, due lo little investment on good development software and poor resource administration.
Lets face it, Square Enix is losing money progressively, because a lack of recent good games, good publicitary campaigns, and reasonable production time.
Theese are the three characteristics that a good developer/publisher will not present, and in my opinion Square - Enix began to suffer inecessary costs from long developing periods since the last generation, and from 2006, began to publish crappy games, altough with a few exceptions.
Now, ¿ why does a company that owns the rights of the two most important RPG franchises all over the world, takes about 4 and a half years to develop a game ? Because of poor resource management, and development software that falls short. It seems to me that Squaresoft didn´t care to invest in that area, and began to pay dearly for it while developing FFXII. Now, it is two years and a half since FFXIII and Versus XIII began development, with a brand new propietary engine, that again falls short on cutting production time / costs.
The solution Yoichi Wada proposed for this, was to launch really crappy games to the worldwide market, using brand names to sell. This has proved rather inefficient, as Square Enix is gaining little profit due to lackluster sales, and it is damaging it's reputation for quality. It seems to me that people who tried Dirge of Cerberus, didn´t give Crisis Core a chance due to the huge letdown the Ps2 game was. Square, is just sieging itself, closing oportunities and killing their own brands.
Now, my solution, and i think most of you are going to agree, is to stop flooding the market with shovelware, and make FFXIII an epic game, that will give the company back its reputation. Then, administer well resources, reforming the company's non- developing personel in the process. Now, with a good basis, invest a huge amount of money on developing software that will cut down production time, thus hindering costs, to launch a great quality game every six months, making use of the company's veteran talent.
So, what do you think?
