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Following Final Fantasy XIII, an exodus at Square Enix

Several Square Enix employees have reportedly parted ways with the Japanese developer after Final Fantasy XIII, among them are some veteran Square personnel including Toshihiro Tsuchida (who directed Front Mission), Takashi Ohkuma (who apparently moved to an island in Okinawa to blog about sunsets), composer Masashi Hamauzu (left to form Monomusik, a new development studio), character art designer Nao Ikeda (who started designing characters for The Legend of Mana), among others.

Sources
  1. Kotaku: Is Making Final Fantasy A Nightmare?

  Gaming News & Blogs / 2011 / March / 07

  • Posted by Matt about
  • Category: Gaming News
  • http://videogam.in/s2248
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Forums / Sblog Discussion / Following Final Fantasy XIII, an exodus at Square Enix

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    Nels Forgetful Optimist
    Nels

    I am aware that turnover is a huge problem in the video game industry. It's kept under the rug a fair bit so I don't have much of an idea about how this compares. Either way though, it sounds very bad.

    Are all the new, good games (they exist) by Square Enix mainly headed by these old guard? Basically, is SE is losing so much of its high quality personnel, does it have any promising replacements?

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    Matt Bahamatt
    Matt

    @Nels

    I am aware that turnover is a huge problem in the video game industry.
    It may just be that here we've followed Square more closely than others, but that seems especially true for that company.

    However, I wonder how Nintendo manages to keep its talent? I've never heard of them losing any key designers, ever (save Gunpei Yokoi...). Indeed, all their veterans -- Eiji Aonuma, Yoshio Sakamoto, Hideki Konno, Koji Kondo, Shigeru Miyamoto -- seem to all be firmly in place.

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    Alex Nephtis
    Alex

    The other thing here is composers seem to regularly leave to become independent - it suits the job role. I imagine it's harder to be a freelance game programmer than a game composer. The fact that a number of people in totally different roles left around the same time doesn't suggest positive things.

    As far as replacements Masashi Hamauzu was one of the few composers left in Square Enix that I really respected, and now he's gone.

    FYI their current line up of composers consists of:

    The remaining sound staff are sound editors or manipulators (and only occasionally providing compositions). I imagine they'll be hiring new staff soon. Either that or they'll just hire freelancers a lot more in the future.

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