In a historic move within the industry, Square Enix is finally setup outside of Japan and in North American waters — Los Angeles to be exact. The new studio, which marks the first stateside venture from the roleplaying game powerhouse, is said to be focusing on digital titles. Due to their unusual small staff list on the development side, it makes sense for this branch of SE to focus on smaller projects.
SE US President, John Yamamoto has confirmed that development will be for multiple platforms, continuing the trend of preferring all platforms over a single unit.
"All formats – Xbox Live, WiiWare, PlayStation Network – are all viable formats for us," said Yamamoto. "We started the in-house development team a couple of months ago and we’re starting with downloadable content because the team is still small. Gradually, I want to expand that team, and also evaluate lots of middleware, because western middleware is much more advanced compared to Japanese middleware. So we will study and feed back information to Square Enix in Japan."
Yamamoto added: "I think it’s always good to introduce new ideas, techniques, and processes into the company in order to stay on the cutting edge. The Last Remnant was the first time we had built a game using an outside development engine, and it taught our developers to find new and creative solutions in order to achieve their objectives."
Despite the multiplatform development, we here at PlayStation Universe are excited to see what this new development studio will churn out for our beloved PlayStation Network.