If you add a shared sub model between XI and XIV

[Pixela]

who doesn't understand how promotional discounts can boost sales makes me glad you aren't the proprietor of a retail establishment.

You're using business tactics used in retail and trying to apply them to a video game with a sub, which doesn't really work.

A shop can want increased sales in order to get lower per unit prices from the supplier, for instance a supermarket gets much cheaper prices due to how many items they sell compared to a small shop.
A shop can want to put a competing shop out of business.
A shop can sell cheap products to sell other things when you're inside.

These don't apply to XI, they don't even want to grow the playerbase either. If they did they would release the game on ps4, release expansions or advertise it more instead of never mention it any way out of fear of it being confused with ff14.

They have even stated their entire goal is to make the players the game already has happy and not appeal to others.

[Sp1cyryan]

You two are perfect together.

[Alhanelem]

You two are perfect together.

A perfect storm, that is....

[Alhanelem]

You're using business tactics used in retail and trying to apply them to a video game with a sub, which doesn't really work.

There's nothing about a game subscription that doesn't allow sales to work.
Let's say you have 1000 people currently playing FFXIV and paying $12.99 a month for it, and none of them currently play FFXI.
SE offers this promotion: "Subscribe to both FFXI and FFXIV and pay only $20.99 a month, that's a $5 savings!"
Let's say 100 people take them up on this offer and begin playing FFXI.
Yes, SE is getting 5 fewer dollars from them for the added FFXI sub.
But these players were not playing FFXI before, so that's still $7.99 that they are getting from these people that weren't getting before they offered this promotion, so for 100 people, that's $799.00 a month that they were not getting from these customers before, because they wouldn't have signed up if they didn't offer the promotion. $799 is greater than 0 so they are still gaining money from existing customers.

Even if you can come up with some fuzzy math to say why you think I'm wrong, SE already offers discounts in other areas from time to time, on server transfer fees and purchasing the game itself, which can be seen as the first month of the game. They wouldn't offer these discounts unless they thought they would get money from people who wouldn't have given it to them otherwise.

The whole point of a promotion is to get money from people that you weren't getting before, and that's what would be happening here if they offered a combo discount.

And even if every last remaining honest player quit the game today, they'd STILL be making money from the botters and thus FFXI wouldn't get shut down.