Quote Originally Posted by Jeeqbit View Post
The reason they had to do this was because they were actually struggling to hire (good) developers. I don't know why that is - maybe their situation in the media at the time, but also there was a practical issue that to work for them people have to live in close proximity. The benefit of buying it was they were all in close proximity, ready to go, and had experience.

So you see, WoW was in a much worse boat patch cycle-wise before you played it. So if Square Enix were to replicate their methods, they would want to look to buy out a game developer with 100 employees so they can skip things such as hiring and (to some degree) training.
To add to this: If you haven't noticed in the past PLLs they've been aggressively trying to hire new people to join their team, and a telling thing is they are now down to "we don't care about your existing credentials, but if you are willing to learn we will train you". Which to me reads there isn't a large pool of ready developers in Japan. Blizzard has the advantage of being in an English-speaking country and with English being the global lingua franca, but Japan doesn't have that luxury. Dawntrail could very well be the very first game several members of the team shipped. Sure there are people whose dreams are to work at Square Enix and Blizzard, but one needs you to know business level Japanese.

Also, asking them to speed up the current cycle would do more harm than good. They did say they have 2 years of planning ahead, and while flexible, it isn't THAT flexible. I've said this elsewhere, but the first time we'll see a lot of this feedback implemented realistically will be 8.0.