Final Fantasy XV Director and Current JP Games Founder Hajime Tabata took part in a livestream on Nico Nico today alongside other prominent developers, and he provided more insight on the cancellation of most of the “A New Dawn” DLC and his own studio.
We learn that JP Games already has a few employees, but they’re currently still looking for an office. The company is self-funded and no external investment was asked or received. While the studio will hire more developers, Tabata-san still intends to keep the numbers quite small.
Tabata-san wonders if he can create an AAA game independently, and he has already thought about some ideas for games that he’d like to make, but he cannot reveal them yet. He does know that he wants to take a multiplatform approach, spanning consoles, PC, and mobile.
While he wants to make large-scale games, he doesn’t want to hire a lot of people in a single location. Even while he was working on Final Fantasy XV, he wanted to change the way games are developed. In a normal development process when things get busy the workload increases creating issues with personnel availability. While outsourcing is a possibility, that also creates problems scaling up production due to hardware distribution and security. Before leaving Square Enix he was about to move to try a cloud-based system, so he wants to evolve the workflow of making games before he actually makes one.
Tabata-san confirmed that he wasn’t laid off by Square Enix, and his retirement was not a result of a soured relationship with the publisher. There is also no relation between the cancellation of the Final Fantasy XV’s DLC and him quitting. He retired on his own due to his own reasons because he’d like to create what he wants and decide his own direction independently.
That being said, he was personally disappointed by the cancellation of the DLC, and he is really sorry for the fans that were looking forward to the new content.
Source: Nico Nico via Gamestalk.
