It's past time to expand the dev team

[Catwho]

1. They are already expanding the team. The credits grow in size with each expansion and development blogs talk of training people.
2. Expanding a team too much results in diminishing returns. They all try to work on each other's tasks and step on each other's toes.
3. It takes time to train them.

This. This this this.

I went to school to work on software projects, not as a developer, but as part of the other bits of the team. I'm currently a business analyst for a medical software company. When I was taking my project management class, we had Brook's Law pounded into our heads: "Adding manpower to a late project will make it later."

Previously, Yoshi P said the limiting factor wasn't money, but simply the availability of high quality programmers. SE has been burned a lot in the last decade because they tried outsourcing projects to other companies in China and Korea, who over promised and under delivered, and they could not provide the quality of work on the timetable they were expected.

Since then, SE has made the decision to try to in-house as much as they can, and form more permanent partnerships with the handful of good companies they've identified to handle the region specific aspects of FFXIV for those localized releases.

There are a finite number of good programmers available, let alone ones that speak fluent Japanese. (Small aside: did you know FF1-3 were actually programmed by an Iranian-American dude by the name of Nasir Gebelli?) Despite the number of comp sci majors being churned out by major universities, and the extreme desirability of working for a company like Square Enix, their standards are very high and they need someone who is known as a "10x programmer" as opposed to a generic web dev monkey like most so-called programmers actually are. The one person I know who is successful in the game development space got a master's degree in AI and now does some insane high level math with Naughty Dog for Sony's ICE unit. Dude is BRILLIANT.

10x programmers usually are home grown, however, and they get to that point by marinating in a system long enough to learn it inside and out. I'm extremely fortunate that I've got four of them on my team at work - but only one of them was a hire fresh out of school; the other three have been doing this for decades, and that's why they're so good at it.

At this point, SE's best bet is to have a couple hundred new hires, let them hang around for a few years, and hope that a dozen or so turn out to be good programmers. The guy who originally programmed the FATEs for ARR (yes, one guy) was one such hire, and he's since been promoted to be a more general battle programmer.