Development Team Downsizing and Justification Makes no Sense

[Alhanelem]

Resources that COULD have gone into FFXI instead went into FFXIV. Yes, population was declining before FFXIV released, but the resources were certainly allocated years prior to that.

I'm not disputing the fact that they focused their efforts on making their new game. That's nothing out of the ordinary. But this was all behind the scenes and could not have influenced player counts, as we were still getting regular new content at this point.


And it is absolutely true that FFXI did not have to suffer for FFXIV to succeed. that's just not the decision that Tanaka made. SE is and was a massive publicly traded company and they didn't HAVE to divert resources or even use the same team in any way to build a new game.

My argument was and is that FFXIV is a symptom, not the cause, of FFXI's decline. FFXIV did not make FFXI go into decline. FFXI was already declining when they decided to take the step of focusing their efforts on a new game. And until that game was announced and revealed to the public, the players had no way of knowing that development focus had shifted to a new project and therefore couldn't just up and decide to start quitting in droves with the expectation a new MMO was on the way. FFXIV began because they had felt (at the time) like they had gotten all the mileage they could out of FFXI.