Where's OUR discount?

[Yinnyth]

Also need to consider they've drastically cut the expenses to maintain XI, without reducing the costs to the consumer. Multiple server mergers, and they gutted the dev and support teams a while back, and have been reaping the increased profit from the XI sector since (hence the speculations that XI has been funding XIV development, as that is where most the personnel likely went).

So your belief is that they're making mad bux off allowing FFXI to crumble? Well, I suppose there's no rule in business saying that you can't do that. I don't share your belief, but I'll acknolege it is a possibility.

But if that is the case, they're not required to tell us anything. We can't even really seek legal action against them for siphoning money from FFXI to other projects (or just pocketing the money). They probably don't even read these posts, or if they do, they probably don't even really care. Even if we get a response from them, who's to say it's not a lie? So what can we really do?

As a side note, if it turns out they really are making bank by downsizing the work force, merging the servers, etc... I'd rather they just reinvest that money into FFXI than get a discount.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

But if that is the case, they're not required to tell us anything.

They're not required to, but it would be a Bad Idea to breed ill-will among the XI base while pushing desperately for goodwill from XIV players. It's only natural for XIV players to look at what's happening with XI to get a feel for what lies in their own future.

At any rate, it occurs to me that it is probably not a coincidence that the new 2012 timeline was published the same day as XIV got its new patch. It feels like management is at least trying to pay lip-service to the idea of supporting both games simultaneously.

[RAIST]

So your belief is that they're making mad bux off allowing FFXI to crumble? Well, I suppose there's no rule in business saying that you can't do that. I don't share your belief, but I'll acknolege it is a possibility.

But if that is the case, they're not required to tell us anything. We can't even really seek legal action against them for siphoning money from FFXI to other projects (or just pocketing the money). They probably don't even read these posts, or if they do, they probably don't even really care. Even if we get a response from them, who's to say it's not a lie? So what can we really do?

As a side note, if it turns out they really are making bank by downsizing the work force, merging the servers, etc... I'd rather they just reinvest that money into FFXI than get a discount.

Well, it's not a difficult concept to grasp. You had 32 servers running and reduced it to 24, but kept roughly the same number of players. You no longer have to include any operational/maintenance/warranty costs for 1/4th of your servers--that includes payroll for employees that burned up time managing them, possibly even removing some personnel from the project and moving them somewhere else, along with those servers. That's another thing too, that hardware and manhours can now be repurposed elswhere. So, in this arena, you've had potentially a 25% savings with negligible loss of income.

Combine this with how we know for a fact that they have scaled back personnel working on FFXI and repurposed them elsewhere in the organization. Some of the many employess they've lost/let go in the past two years (as posted in their annual reports, there has been considerable reduction in personnel as a whole) could have also come from the FFXI project. Some employees may have been replaced, but as a whole, there has been a reduction in their work force. And yet, again....they've maintained income from FFXI despite the reduction in costs to have people available to work on it.

I would hazard a guess that the cost per player to maintain it now is significantly less then it was in 2005 when I got into it--broadband is cheaper per unit; initial investments for hardware has been paid for, upgraded, and probably that re-investment has been recovered by now as well; personnel demands are now lower to support it as it is (mostly) debuggged and for the most part running on auto-pilot now (it in fact feels like a lot of the support may be farmed out); and as far as we know has no major development projects in the works--at least not in the scope of the pre-WotG expansions that added completely new areas and such.

Simply put, it is costing them less and less to support the game, and those players are still paying the same rate now as they did 5-7 years ago.