The next generation of consoles are all pretty much confirmed to be coming, as major publishers and developers are looking to settle in to the new hardware with major investments. For Square Enix, that means a second studio in Canada, chosen for its generous tax incentives and subsidies. According to La Presse, the new studio is opening in 2012 with the expected capacity of around 100 employees, and will either be in Montreal, Quebec, or Toronto.
“The new consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will require more attention and more staff,” said Eidos Montreal director Stéphane D’Astous. “We want to prepare ourselves.”
Interesting, I know that Microsoft is hiring engineers for a new console, but that probably won’t come out for another 2-3 years. Sony will be around the same time as Microsoft, but Nintendo should be sooner, with a new console potentially coming holiday next year (they need to at this point).
Now if they are talking about the 3DS and NGP, then most definitely they will need to employ quite a few people to understand that new technology and create high quality games for those systems.
Seeing as how we don’t know anything about any new consoles and what hardware they could be packing, hiring a team of 100 people now doesn’t seem very efficient; that is of course unless they have the consoles, and have been keeping them under very tight lips (Sony has had a problem with that lately).
Well, getting a studio established early is a good idea. And with Square’s rather problematic development and localization schedule of late, is probably a good idea anyways. Glad to see more work coming to Canada for game devleopers, just wish some of them would look at Winnipeg. We’ve got a huge, completely untapped pool of Programmer-trained talent(I know 5 people personally with programming degrees and an interest in game development who are working call center jobs, for example), more time to game than any major city in the world, and we get about 35-50% of the internet traffic in North America(not to mention other forms of communication information for which we’re also a pretty major hub) passing through our city.
But game developers need to be ready for new consoles, because the companies that release the big games at the release of a console are usually the ones who do the best for that console – usually.