This is a BIG BIG Guess I'm making here.
I was going to make a new thread about SE as a company and what I think they have done and doing, but since this thread already exists, I'm gonna stick my thoughts here.
SE made FFXI, and it is/was a successful product.
But... SE found out there was an upcoming problem, probably knew around the time they made ToAU. Limitations to expand.
They had to think of a solution, and their solution was FFXIV.
FFXIV ultimately is a clone to FFXI, as some would say, it is FFXI-2. It looking like a clone worried me even with new graphics and more customizable faces. That is as much as I know about FFXIV. I was not paying too much attention to FFXI or FFXIV at this time. One other thing I know about FFXIV is that it failed, exactly why is basically what I'm hearing is mainly the economy and for experimenting new things like they always do for their games, but it failed so bad that SE apologized for it.
Nevertheless, they lost money on making FFXIV. So now they are stuck with a game that is running out of space to release more entertaining content, and a game that was not entertaining.
They needed to fix something. I talked to a friend yesterday about dropping PS2 support, and it made me realize that it was going to take a whole lot more money than I thought it would. In other words, dropping the PS2 support is not very cost-effective. So they planned to fix FFXIV only. The base for the game is still there (storyline, jobs, etc.), they just need to tweak gameplay.
But how are they going to fix a game they lost money on, and now have to put more man-hours into. I don't think they have a whole lot of money to really play with. So, they turned to FFXI, their main source of profit right now.
Right now, I feel they are squeezing every last drop of their hopes and dreams onto FFXI by making it more attainable to be high level. They increased the LVcap, created Abyssea and made EXP gain nuts, created Empyrean Armor and Weapons, increased exp for non-Abyssea areas, and they commented on the Gym idea to fix skill ups. All this has pulled in new players.
I've seen a lot of new low level players around, as if they flocked in like a bunch of fruit flies to a fruit basket. SE ultimately increased the amount of fee money they are accumulating, to where it probably off-balanced the amount of players leaving because of the lack of new content for FFXI. But, SE does have a good plan, imo.
With the money ranking in with what they can with FFXI, FFXIV is in the process of being remade, and they will aim for the best of their ability towards this. This means that we may not see a future for FFXI because they are squeezing the life out of it for the sake of profits. And FFXIV will be reborn, with the hopes of it doing what FFXI could not, expand.
This is what I believe is happening. This is not fact, everything I said is a guess. I don't plan on replying to anyone about this, because I may be very well wrong about everything and have no solid evidence to back up anything I said. I am taking nothing but an educated guess here. I still enjoy FFXI despite what I believe they are doing to it though. You can deny any of this to be true, but you'll have to ask SE what they really are doing and trying to change my mind isn't going to do much good. For all who want to troll and flame this post, I recommend you to listen to Verse 1 of "One Step Closer" by Linkin Park.
One thing is true. You can either support SE right now in hopes they fix what is wrong or flame them and stop any kind of support they desperately need from their players. And they need even more support as they not only lost profits due to a failed product, but now losing profits due to the disaster and turning off their services to both.