Today on Headline RePLAY: The CEO of Sony is bowing
out of the SCE board, South Korea’s controversial Shutdown Law is challenged
and Square-Enix plans to outsource with large-scale development projects.
Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai is stepping down from his position
as representative director and chairman on the Sony Computer Entertainment
board.
Instead, Hirai is moving to a part-time role with
the SCE board. Chairman Howard Stringer, however, is retiring from his
part-time position with SCE.
Hiroshi Kawano, president of SCE Japan, joins a new
team of executives appointed to the SCE board.
|Source: GamesIndustry International
South Korea’s controversial Shutdown Law, created
to prevent players under the age of sixteen from gaming online between midnight
and 6 a.m., may be found unconstitutional as two lawsuits makes their way
through the country’s courts.
The law was passed last year, despite assertions by
critics that it infringes upon the civil rights of children and that it’s
excessively prohibitive.
A coalition of parents and teenagers filed one
lawsuit, claiming that the law attacks parental rights to educate their own children.
Another suit was filed by the Korean Game Industry, consisting of companies
like NCsoft, Neowiz and Nexon, arguing that the law is unjust.
For their part, South Korea’s Ministry of Gender
Equality and Family maintains that the Shutdown Law is the “bare minimum” to
protect teenagers.
|Source: Kotaku
It’s no secret that Square-Enix is fraught with very
long development times for their flagship titles like the Final Fantasy series.
The director of Final Fantasy XIII
and XIII-2 agrees, and revealed that
the company is planning to outsource development with large-scale projects from
now on vs. completely developing internally.
“The development time was quite long,” Motomu
Toriyama told Gamasutra at GDC Taipei, speaking on the development of XIII. “Within our company, developing on
PlayStation for Final Fantasy XIII we
required a huge amount of graphical data…At the peak, there were over 200
people working on it.” The team consisted of 180 artists, 30 programmers, and
36 game designers.
“We are also thinking that we will not do
large-scale internal development any longer,” he revealed, citing time
constraints and lessons learned from XIII.
“We have a lot of great creators in Square-Enix, but for larger-scale
development we will be doing more distributed and outsourced development to reach
our targets on time.”
|Source: Gamasutra
