GDC China: Square Enix CTO Merceron On Game Tech & Thinking Globally

In a fascinating talk at GDC China in Shanghai on Monday, Square Enix's global CTO Julien Merceron discussed his history at Ubisoft and Eidos and his remit at Square Enix, explaining how he manages the company's massive global tech footprint. In his time at Ubisoft working on games and eventually helping to run global tech, he noted that it was key for the Assassin's Creed creator to "go early on new platforms" to build up experience and get ahead of the competition. He took that experience to publisher Eidos, where the company had major game franchises in Hitman and Tomb Raider. He was tasked with building global technology strategies for that company before its Square Enix acquisition. Merceron noted that Eidos was a smaller company with small studios, but they had "tons of brands" to potentially develop, leading to the formation of Eidos Montreal to work on the then-dormant Deus Ex and Thief franchises. With extremely talented people at key Eidos studios like Crystal Dynamics and IO Interactive, there was a lot that could be done. But there were myriad issues along the way, including being late to the PS3/Xbox console transition and relatively little potential growth for talented individuals within the organization. Clearly, the Eidos Montreal studio was a success, having now delivered Deus Ex: Human Revolution as a high-quality hit title, and Merceron explained how "technology is an enabler". For him, it's studios and studio culture that really make your company great. Getting your technology pipelines straight is vital, and the CTO explained this was even more true in adapting when Square Enix bought Eidos in early 2009. Merceron noted that when he started visiting Tokyo, before becoming global CTO at Square Enix, he was surprised by the negative feelings within Japan about where their game biz was going. Even in public, a lot of Japanese creators were saying, as Merceron put it: "We've lost it - we don't know how to make games any more." He explained that key creators "were complaining that their teams were too big and it was taking 5 to 6 years to make a game." But, as the CTO put it: "If you have all these problems and you are already profitable, then it is great… wow, we're going to have even more profit when we're done." Yet later he began to understand that the developers "couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel" sometimes, and "have a hard time changing process". The challenges ended up being significant. For starters, making a game is "not that sexy" for programmers in Japan, and existing game middleware tools in the country tended to be somewhat outdated. And with over 2,000 developers in Square Enix's Tokyo offices alone, compared to less than 1,000 across multiple studios for Eidos, Merceron looked across the possibilities and felt than the two companies really were complementary. So what did he actually do? With separate boards for technology for Eidos (then called Square Enix Europe) and for Square Enix in Tokyo, and a global board combining members from both, Merceron managed to combine the Japanese and Western sensibilities in a sensitive manner. As for technology, Eidos largely used the Glacier 2 engine originally developed at IO Interactive for Hitman, and CDC (used for Deus Ex and Tomb Raider.). But Square Enix had Crystal Tools, which was used for many products in the Final Fantasy series and beyond, but perhaps needed an ultimate successor. How would you go forward from there? The Luminous engine was the result. This is an in-progress Japanese-originated engine that takes some key tech from the G2 and CDC engines, but is a technology owned and created by the Japanese Square Enix team. This is a solution to collaboration much more sensible than simply imposing Western engines made for Western-centric games on Japanese teams that require different things. Merceron doesn't believe the 'one engine fits all' approach, but also noted that having 18 different engines for 18 different teams also clearly doesn't work. The Square Enix CTO concluded that going forward, preparing for the future is fundamental, and knowledge management - really getting peers to understand what their colleagues are doing elsewhere in the firm - is a must have. Spanning the different but successful cultures of Eidos and Square Enix is one of the toughest jobs in the biz. But Merceron thinks deeply and with complexity about the many issues therein, and it's a testament to his work that the company continues to thrive.