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Square Enix to speak about Final Fantasy XIV's initial failures at GDC

GDC has announced several talks from Japanese developers, including Keiji Inafune on Kickstarter success and Square Enix on MMO failures.

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GDC has announced several talks from Japanese developers including Square Enix's Naoki Yoshida and Comcept's CEO Keiji Inafune.

Square Enix's Naoki Yoshida will talk about his experiences relaunching the troubled Final Fantasy XIV as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. He'll analyze the causes for the MMO's initial failures and Square Enix's decision to relaunch it. Yoshida will also share stories about the process of creating an MMO title in under three years, and touch on why Square Enix is committed to a subscription business model.

Inafune and localization company 8-4's Executive Director Mark MacDonald will talk about what they've learned about crowdfunding a Japanese game and other trends in the Japanese games industry.

After leaving Capcom, Inafune took to Kickstarter to fund Mighty No. 9, which dwarfed its funding goal of $900,000 with a total of $3.8 million pledged.

"Attendees can look forward to learning more about the advantages and challenges of developing modern Japanese games for a primarily Western audience," GDC said on its website.

Finally, BitSummit director James Mielke will give a talk about the Japanese indie games scene. He'll compare it to Western indie scene, and explain why in Japan the word "indie" is still equated with "amateur."

Previously announced Japanese talks include a postmortem of Shenmue, a talk from the developers of Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and a talk from the Vice President of IGDA Japan about philanthropic game jams following the Fukushima earthquake in 2011.

GDC will be held in San Francisco, March 17-21.

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