2. From a long, somewhat rambling, but quite interesting article on the ongoing failure of Square:
it's no secret that seven out of ten game pitch documents here in The West are plastered with concept art pulled shamelessly from Deviantart.com, with asterisked captions under every tenth or eleventh image: "This art is copyright Some Talented Individual From The Internet—she or he is not our employee, though this is definitely the sort of thing we would want an artist to do; in fact, we might hire this person." I don't see anything wrong with this method. Well, in Japan, they do: You can't photograph your friend hugging a plastic statue of Colonel Sanders without a representative of Kentucky Fried Chicken theatrically weeping and groping his face at you. It's confusing and weird.3. Fingerprint scanner that works from several feet away. Via.
So what I'm driving at is this: they say Japan is on the skids—re: games, anyway—and they say that The West is on the smooths. I tell you what—the smooths are pretty smooth, up in here. And I tell you what again—in Japan, they wouldn't use some kid's art in their pitch document. They'd have to offer the kid a lifetime contract first. So, in this manner, I present you with a hypothesis that Square-Enix has accumulated—through numerous expansions, attempted expansions, and maybe-superfluous conglomerations, so many artists that a nuclear physicist wouldn't feel wrong assuming that they were probably—and definitely—the most important members of the company.
