A few days ago, Julien Merceron, global CTO of Square Enix, has accepted an interview with SINA Games, in which he illustrates topics ranging from game developing to the outsourcing marketing of the industry, together with his personal experience. The following is the detailed dialogue:

 

 

 

Julien : 2010 is a cornerstone year for many Companies in the Video Game Business, and it is a also a key year for China and Shanghai as well, because of the Expo; the Expo is a very international event, so I hope CGOC 2010 can be special in that way as well, more “international” than previous installments: I would like CGOC 2010 to deliver a strong message to the Game Development Community inside and outside Asia. And I expect my talk to be in that vein: I’ll talk about the future of Graphics, and the new type of techniques that Game Developers and Outsourcing companies will certainly want to embrace, which will help us identify more opportunities to all work together. My talk is going to try to highlight how fast techniques change, how dynamic our community is, how much room for innovation there is, and highlight the importance of R&D.

 

 

Julien : The data representation we use for graphic assets won’t be that optimal in the future, as it tends to require more memory and bandwidth than FLOPS. As we know that the amount of FLOPS available for rendering is going to grow a lot faster than the amount of memory and bandwidth available, that means that we have to look into other approaches, like Subdivision surfaces and displacement maps; this model is a lot more memory and bandwidth friendly. Coming back to your question about 3D, I think that will also have an impact on the way assets are built: Bump Mapping and Parallax Mapping don’t really have real depth influence, so surfaces using these techniques will appear flat when viewed with 3D glasses… unless you do something special about it! And I’ll talk about this as well.

 

 

Julien : All three companies are very different is shape and style, and their strategies are slightly different as well. That said, their respective approaches are very much relevant, as these are just tailored to their respective strategies. That means also that the type of Technology Strategy I work on now is very different from the past two ones, and I find that very interesting! As you might have seen on the internet, I’ve often praised the Final Fantasy franchise in the past, so for me it is amazing to think that maybe the initiatives I’m currently working on will be helping Square Enix to make an even better Final Fantasy in the future!

 

 

Julien : Wow, that is a very wide question! Please remember I joined Square Enix recently, so I would probably feel more comfortable answering that question in a year or two from now!

 

 

Julien : Square Enix has been launching and supporting Games in China in the past. As the Chinese Game Development Community and Chinese Video Games Market are growing extremely fast these days, I think that it means even more opportunities for that in the future!

 

 

Julien : I agree with the term you are using: epoch-making game. I think that the work that is being done on Final Fantasy XIV is really fantastic. A lot of it is unfortunately very confidential at this stage, that said I think you’ll hear a lot more about this game soon!

 

 

Julien : You’re right, we have many partners in China. As you know, I’ve come regularly to Shanghai since 1998, and I’ve seen things changing and growing with my own eyes! The Game Development Community is very impressive: a lot bigger now, covering a wide range of platforms, services and game genre. From my experience, I can say I’ve been amazed by the skills of certain artists and programmers! One special field that could maybe benefit from improvements is probably Game Design, that said you’ll agree with me that there start to be pretty well-known Game Creators in China!