Luminous Studio
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| Developer(s) | Square Enix |
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| Initial release | June 2012 |
| Platform | PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows |
| Type | Game engine |
| License | Proprietary |
Luminous Studio (ルミナス・スタジオ Ruminasu Sutajio?) is a multi-platform game engine developed and used internally by Square Enix. The engine was developed for and targeted at eighth-generation hardware and DirectX 11-compatible platforms, such as Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, and versions of Microsoft Windows. It was conceived during the development of Final Fantasy XIII-2 to be compatible with next generation consoles that their existing platform, Crystal Tools, could not handle.
The engine powered the Agni's Philosophy and Witch Chapter 0 tech demos and now centers on Final Fantasy XV, a title in the Final Fantasy series for eighth-generation consoles. Critics praised the engine's two tech demos, citing their graphics and real time rendering and declaring the engine as representative of the future of gaming.
According to Julien Merceron, the Worldwide Technology Director for Square Enix in the early 2010s, the concept for the new engine was born in 2011 while he was in the final stages of working on Final Fantasy XIII-2. This was a difficult period for Square Enix: the project then known as Final Fantasy Versus XIII was hitting technical barriers as it transitioned to open world environments its original Crystal Tools engine could not handle, and Final Fantasy XIV had met with a disastrous launch due to development and technical problems. Faced with these issues, Square Enix decided to bring in former developers from Sega to create new engines for their products, including Luminous Studio. Talking about sharing the engine, Merceron said that he advised the company to avoid sharing between companies or internally between games until the engine had been finalized with the released game: this resulted in Luminous Studio being restricted to what would become Final Fantasy XV during development, while other major next-generation titles would use other outsourced engines.
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