lostinblue
Banned
If Capcom has they do as well.Crystal took many years to develop and in the end the games suffered from it. Square just doesn't have the resources to develop proprietary high end engines.
They need to focus on the output instead of wasting money polishing rocks.
Issue is down to lack of organization and goals as well as planning, Square-Enix was used to do bad code optimization (ie: optimize code too much for the target platform just so porting would be balls later on) and White Engine/Crystal Tools started exactly like that being very optimised for CELL and it's SPE's for particle effects and shit.
Their structure simply doesn't work well to serve several games in a row unless they're direct sequels, you'll be moving and entirely rewriting huge chunks of code, as seen with FFXIV and Dragon Quest X.
Scalability also looks to be shite, it's clearly not hardware abstract enough.
And then again it's hard to compete with Unreal Engine 4 being the step up over several successful engine generations - they don't rewrite it all from the ground so some stuff is just there ready to be used. They don't have that stable platform to climb up from.
Perhaps they should have bought some engine provider a few years back like most did and fork their work going up, EA bought Renderware (and sadly ran it into the ground afterwards) and Bethesda bought Id Software. Square bough no-one with proof record for that, they chose to just press through.
They could have invested on Crystal Dynamics for that, they have their engine solution that seems to work for the most part, scalable no less judging for how long they supported the PS2 and Wii... They only needed to separate the engine development from them. But they won't.
S-E is a megalomania patient and trust only themselves (to fuckup, no less), so perhaps it's better this way or Crystal Dynamics would be blamed for their inability to work with it, like Eidos in general was blamed a while back for their bad showing even though they were the only ones releasing games; good games at that, but S-E expectations were world domination or something.