At GDC Taipei, Motomu Toriyama, the director of both Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2, said that Square Enix will avoid large internal productions like those in the future. His exact words? "Within our company, developing on PlayStation for Final Fantasy XIII we required a huge amount of graphical data. … At the peak, there were over 200 people working on it,” he said. “The breakdown there was 180 artists, 30 programmers, and 36 game designers.”
He explained that such a large team led to enormous problems with both communication and testing. As a result, Square Enix will outsource their development projects in the future. This isn't to say that they will completely outsource everything, but most likely they will hire help for the art.
I know that many studios delegate out help in developing a title, but I half wonder if this isn't Square Enix's way of slowly leaving development entirely for publishing. It's been a trend as of late except for a few key franchises, but now it looks like they're willing to dole those franchises out as well. Either way, it's an interesting development (no pun intended) to watch in Square Enix's future.
Question now is, how will they develop/publish Final Fantasy XIII-3? We all know that's coming.
