Video games are a business, it’s just the way it is. And as such, developers and publishers have to do what they must to both make great games and make money through them. Sometimes that means only hiring certain amounts of people to make games. Other times, it means consolidating resources when making multiple games. Though this is a viable option, that doesn’t mean everyone wants to do it. This includes Square Enix.
The CEO of Square Enix, Yosuke Matsuda, talked with Edge Magazine about many things. One of them was about EA, who has been using their Frostbite engine to fuel all of their video games, including Battlefront II, Battlefield 1, Mass Effect, etc. And with a lof of big games coming from Square Enix in the future, they wondered if they would do the same.
“We have been thinking about it. The downside of that is that if we had one unified development platform, it would make it a lot harder to express the different characters, the different proclivities of our titles – we make a very broad range of games, and it might affect the variation we can get in there. I think a much better way of improving the efficiency of our development that is more fitting to the way we work is, rather than unifying everything on the same platform, to take all the different approaches the individual studios use and are very familiar with, and have them exchange information about the tools and methods they use. In that process of unification, consolidation there is obviously the trade-off in terms of individuality, and I would rather value that than the efficiency gains to be had from consolidation.”
That’s very understandable, especially since they make various kinds of RPGs, and not just ones that require human-looking character models. So, if they want to use more than one engine, by all means.