Hello SE!
I am a software engineer of ~15 years and have lots of experience supporting applications and infrastructure that are aging. I think, in fact, I have made a career out of working on technical debt. I understand the perspective of many developers, who want to continuously update their skill set by working on newer technologies, or else risk stagnation by remaining on a platform, which depends on skills that will not be desirable years or decades later.
Two things will always remain true:
- Operational overhead and technical support for an aging production platform will only increase, as tools, software environments and hardware are deprecated or reach their end-of-life.
- Attracting or retaining engineering talent will be necessary in order to support the platform's development life cycle. This will prove difficult for the reasons mentioned above, as developers flock to new technologies and continuously improve their skill set.
Similarly, the potential revenue gained by maintaining the platform will eventually be eclipsed by the costs associated with development, operations, monitoring, alerting, as well as periodic upkeep, security fixes, compliance and infrastructure upgrades.
Producer Matsui has already mentioned some of these challenges in various interviews to Famitsu over the last two years. and again last month: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/fin...medium=twitter
However, these are not insurmountable problems:
- There already exists a sizable open-source development community willing to maintain Final Fantasy XI, and I believe Square-Enix is already aware of this.
- Offering a complete, free, open-source distribute-able version of Final Fantasy XI available to the public, will ensure a beloved, main-numbered Final Fantasy-title remains in circulation without any associated costs to the company. (Hosting this installation, technically, can even be done on an official Square-Enix github/gitlab/bitbucket account).
In my mind, it would be unthinkable to permanently shut-down FFXI beyond the 20th anniversary, but simply unsustainable to keep the game running without substantive, quality updates that warrant players continuing to pay the cost of one (or more) subscriptions.
On one hand, decommissioning FFXI would mean a main-numbered Final Fantasy title would not be accessible to the general public. On the otherhand, maintaining FFXI beyond the point of being able to provide regular, qualitative content or updates also goes against the reputation of the Final Fantasy brand. In other words, today, any gamer can and often does pick up any Final Fantasy game they want and start playing it by various means (retro consoles, modern consoles, various handhelds, etc etc). They do this because Final Fantasy games are historically great. Providing us with an open-source version of FFXI ensures that Final Fantasy 11 remains in the hearts and minds of both gamers and developers (as SE intends) indefinitely.
I hope you seriously consider this request, as your loyal fanbase of nearly two decades will continue to keep this game alive, long after the operational overhead and other forms of technical debt have become too burdensome.
Thank you for your time.