I may be alone in this, but I'm not convinced that choosing not to license it was a bad idea. In fact, I think trying to license it could actually hurt them more than it would help for a few reasons.Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
The first obvious one is that it would cost a lot of money to get into the engine licensing business up front, with no guaranteed return. You've got to have things like good engine documentation, and be prepared to support it once people license it. This means not only constantly updating the engine and the related documentation, but actively helping developers do what they want it to do if you're smart about it. Square has no experience with this though, and it really would be starting from scratch in a new business, albeit a business somewhat related to the one they're in.
But more than that, this certainly looks like it's intended to be a AAA next-gen engine, and there's already a lot to compete with in that market. You've got Epic whose Unreal engine is basically the defacto leader in licensed engines for AAA games. And Epic is really a tech developer and engine license seller first and game developer second if we're going to be honest about it. It's their main business, and they've not only been doing it for years but they've practically cornered the market. But then Square also has to contend with companies like EA with Dice's Frostbite engine now, and other companies like Valve, id, and Naughty Dog, who have typically done their tech in house and also happen to do a very good job of it, making it suit their needs and making things pretty scalable/easy to use so they can use it for multiple titles. There's also the fact that this engine is being developed by Square in Japan, making supporting it for a Western market more difficult. Sure, they could try to license it in Japan as well, but the number of developers on that side of the Pacific working in AAA titles seems to be shrinking even faster than over here. Mind you, this may be a bit of a non-issue if they want some of their western developers to use the engine anyway since they'll need to translate the tools and support it for those companies anyway.
But really, I just don't see a lot of room in the AAA market space for another engine to be licensed unless it can somehow show that it's dramatically better than what Epic is doing. As it is, there are a lot of developers that are either already comfortable with the Unreal engine and aren't likely to want to change from that without good reason, and others that are working with major publishers that have their own in house engine solutions they can rely on as well.
For now, I'd say the safer bet is making this engine flexible and making sure the development pipeline is nice and trying to get as many in house teams as possible using it where it makes sense to. Square is a big publisher with a lot of teams and subsidiaries, so if they can actually use this to reduce the need to develop new engines constantly then there are probably some cost savings and efficiencies to be gained here that will be a lot easier to realize than entering the engine licensing business. Hopefully they follow through with that a bit more this time than they did with Crystal Tools. Were it not for two FFXIII sequels I don't think they would have done much with that engine.
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