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impressive is that it doesn’t feel forced. It’s quite natural, and that’s important to get initiatives driving.” There’s tremendous potential for saving costs and improving product through collaboration, says D’Astous. He explains that the Deus Ex project is being built with an engine made by Crystal Dynamics, but the studio received more than a good editor. “There’s some really good tech there, but the best thing is that the whole project got a kick-start because the Crystal Dynamics team helped us figure out how to use it all. We’re sharing a lot of data, a lot of tech, and a lot of best-practices among each of the studios. That’s what happens at the start, and when a project’s in place we branch off from the group and do our own thing.” He insists, however, that this engine share was Eidos Montréal’s preference, and not a case of enforced hand-me-downs from within the Square Enix group. “Of course, as Eidos Montreal’s general manager, I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. It’s risky if you focus too much on one technology, so Deus Ex uses Crystal Dynamics tech, while our other project, Thief 4, won’t. “It’s certainly much easier to recruit people if you use a standard external third-party tool, so we have looked at this for Thief.” GLOBAL COLLABORATION So tech is not being enforced from the top down, it seems. Wada admits that, with this philosophy implemented across the entire company, third-party tool use has not been so easy to encourage back in Japan. “We have worked very hard to convince our developers to use external tools more, but in actuality our teams very seldom used them,” he says. DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
“Over the past three years I think our people have just begun at last to have more understanding for external tool use. I don’t think using external tools will necessarily bring costs down – some of them can be very expensive. What’s most important is the standardisation, for all our studios to use common tech within.” Rogers steps in: “There’s a lot of tech sharing, and we bring our studio general managers together on a very regular basis and look at all our projects together, but we try to strike a balance of having focus within
There’s a lot of tech sharing, and we bring our studio general managers together on a very regular basis and look at all our projects together. Yoichi Wada, Square Enix our individual teams, and at the same time have those teams talk to each other. We really can’t force that. We can’t just force crossborder partnerships. In a way, our collaboration is driven by a need to solve problems, a need for different solutions.” Example? How about that Deus Ex: Human Revolution trailer? The one that launched at E3 and single-handedly pushed the game’s hype to mountainous heights. It was made, D’Astous explains, somewhere thousands of miles away from Eidos Montreal, within another segment of the Square Enix group.
“One of our first collaborative efforts with Square Enix was with Visual Works [the firm’s Tokyo-based CG movie production department], who made the trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution that everyone went crazy about,” he says. “People loved the video, it won so many awards at E3, so as you might of guessed, so far I’ve been very happy to collaborate.” From Develop’s discussions with all the general managers of Square Enix’s studios, it’s apparent that this philosophy of collaboration is now fully embedded into studio culture. Nils Jorgensen, the general manager at Denmark studio IO Interactive, makes that abundantly clear. “The future games market is going to be global. It is a target audience that crosses national borders,” Jorgensen says. “And at IO we actually have to employ a lot of foreign talent to the studio. I’d say more than 30 per cent of our employees are from countries other than Denmark. “In all I think we have people from more than 20 different countries here. So the atmosphere and culture is quite international, and I think it’s easier for us to develop games that are for a broader market, because we understand a lot of different cultures.”
From left: Final Fantasy 13, the latest console release in a series that has long crossed cultural borders in terms of its appeal
AMERICAN DREAM Few know this, but Square Enix now has a small development team based out in Los Angeles, working under the management of the firm’s new US CEO Mike Fischer. Fischer tells Develop that a start-up team like this, in particular, can greatly benefit from Square Enix’s global-studio philosophy. “Because they are a small team you don’t necessarily have a wealth of resources,” he says, “but what makes it happen is that there DECEMBER 2010/JANUARY 2011 | 43