Quote Originally Posted by Mirage View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
I'm not so sure about this. Odds are as publisher Square would be paying the developer for the game development which would mean taking money away from another project. It might not take money away from a Japanese developed FF of course, but something else may get canned. Whether that turned out to be a good or bad thing though, who could say?
I was thinking more along the lines of a company would be asked if they wanted to do a FF title, and then they'd get a share of the earnings the game brought in, while the game itself was mostly financed by the third party developer. Even if SE did put a bit of money into it, money isn't really what's slowing down game releases from them.
The trouble I have with this is that when it comes to funding a triple-A title on the level of an FF title, there aren't many developers who could afford to finance it themselves even with the promise of profit sharing. Not many developers have the money to develop for 2-3 years without receiving funding from publishers in the form of milestone payments or whatever else. At least not many who could develop independently and be big enough to pull it off. In fact, the only company I think would have the financial independence to do it might be Valve. All the other big names are reliant on their publishers as far as I know. And even with a bankable name like FF, getting funding from places other than a publisher would be difficult.

All that said though, I think a big publisher like Square would prefer to be funding the development anyway because then they can exercise more control over development for better or worse.