Honest Feedback: Shadowbringers

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Originally Posted by Wynn_Storm

That is just incredibly disappointing. Its such a shame since FF14 is probably the 2nd biggest mmorpg, right behind WoW.

I personally think this was the time for them to push harder than ever, since WoW is flopping hard right now.

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XIV is actually 3rd. Behind WoW and 2007scape according to
https://mmo-population.com. But looking at the player counts as a whole shows the MMORPG age has calmed down alot compared to early 2000's. It doesn't look profitable for investors and companies.

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Originally Posted by AxlStream

XIV is actually 3rd. Behind WoW and 2007scape according to
https://mmo-population.com. But looking at the player counts as a whole shows the MMORPG age has calmed down alot compared to early 2000's. It doesn't look profitable for investors and companies.

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Not to sell old school runescape short, since i love that game and still play it.. I don't think the numbers are accurate. If its just going by accounts made then its unfair since its a F2P game. Not only that it has a lot of bots.

I still think FF14 is #2 since the numbers for OSRS are inflated.

Looking at this from a purely financial angle, it still makes no sense. Companies know that investors tend to pull away when they see backlash of this magnitude: It shows that the company is making poor decisions and are out of touch with their player base. This is largely why World of Warcraft had begun failing after the Activision Merger when they had to buy all of their stocks back from Vivendi. The company started to cut costs and their investors began to bail one after another. If SE is after money, this was NOT the way to go about it and they should have learned from Blizzard Activision Inc.'s mistakes.

The money it would have taken to create the female and male counterparts of the races would have brought in far more revenue than it would have cost to create the content and possibly brought new investors on board, or kept current investors interested. It would have sparked respect and admiration from players in other MMORPGS such as Warcraft to make them check out the game after seeing how the Devs cater to the community in this game. All around, gender-locking LOST SE a lot of money. As this backlash is making more new players wary of joining the game altogether - when they would have otherwise purchased the game and new expansion.

"If they're making their current fan base so angry... why should I join the game?"

This is not a question you want to leave potential customers with.

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Originally Posted by Nightstalker190

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We must have read two different interviews. Yoshi-P never said anything about "cost cutting measures." He did mention that new races are taxing on the development team and are quite costly. What he said and cost cutting measures are two very, very different statements. People really need to understand that new races are (in my opinion) not worth it, given how much time (read: money) is required to make it work, versus what that money could be put towards for actual content. That's what Yoshi-P means. Not that costs had to be cut, but that new races require so much [time and labour] investment, that at a certain point, it is not netting you returns that other content would.

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Originally Posted by Angellos

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Two things people really need to understand. The "player base" is not upset at the gender reveals, or even the no healer reveal. The forum player base, or at least part of it, is upset. That is a fraction of the player base. Do we know if the player base is happy or upset with the news? No, we don't, because we don't know the opinions of nearly enough players, relative to the total number of players.

Secondly, this applies to WoW too. If you go to any WoW forum, the sky is most assuredly falling, and all because BFA is a bad expansion. Yet, if you read the investor calls, there is no such panick. Subscriptions suffered an expected decline (you have no chance of sustaining or increasing players a couple months after an expansion launches), but WoW related revenue hasn't fallen off. So like with XIV, it's a fraction of the players who are visibly upset, and it is not reflective of the player base at large.

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Originally Posted by MPK

There's literally nothing wrong with not having to make new models that people will never use. Resources should be used to fix the game not add more things that can easily break

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No idea why people assume that the same team in charge of designing new races is the same team that fixes bugs and makes adjustments to the game. They aren't implementing new races at the cost of other content, that's not how that works.

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Originally Posted by Eli85

Two things people really need to understand. The "player base" is not upset at the gender reveals, or even the no healer reveal. The forum player base, or at least part of it, is upset. That is a fraction of the player base. Do we know if the player base is happy or upset with the news? No, we don't, because we don't know the opinions of nearly enough players, relative to the total number of players.

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I just want to note that it's not just the forums. It's exploded on Twitter, one of the largest, if not THE largest, social media app. Along with other sites such as tumblr. Facebook, too.

Still a fraction, maybe, but it's a whole lot larger than you might think.

What you'd need to justify to an investor is whether or not the additional resource needed to put in Male Viera and Female Hrothgar is going to be worth the money.

If you can't convince them of that then you need to convince the playerbase that taking existing resource away from developing new content and putting it into developing these are going to be worth the time and effort.

Personally, as much as I would like them to be implemented, if it meant actual game content was to suffer as a result I'd be against it.

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Originally Posted by Edax

I think SE believes the profit growth of FFXIV is already capped, so they've moved most of their resources to other projects. All content from now on is going to be developed with more and more limitations.

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I feel a bit different here. For me it feels more like the classical AAA Publisher way.
There are two ways they see Games today:
"reinvest the same as last Year and expect more" or "reinvest less and expect the same as last Year".
And FF14 runs more into the "reinvest less and expect the same amount of Money." direction, creating all those limitations of Money, Time and Ressources.

Both ways sell a Profit and growth of a Company/Franchise to Investors, who do not care for anything outside of the Numbers.

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Originally Posted by Eli85

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There is something a Software Developer once told me about complains.
"One loud complain equals 100 silent complains.".

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Originally Posted by AxlStream

XIV is actually 3rd. Behind WoW and 2007scape according to
But looking at the player counts as a whole shows the MMORPG age has calmed down alot compared to early 2000's. It doesn't look profitable for investors and companies.

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Today, this comes down to a guessing Game for those Websites, because no Dev Team is allowed to talk about their Numbers.
Since WoW dropped below the 5 Million Player count, Blizzatd stopped to talk about the Numbers and never answers questions about it.
The same goes for ArenaNet, Pearl Abyss, ZeniMax Online or any of the other Studios.
Because otherwise the Marketing could not throw around Numbers like 14 Million Players, 20 Million Player...etc.

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Originally Posted by Atreyu

Also I don't know how or why SE won't allow one of their largest and most profitable games a bigger budget.

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Because triple A game companies don't invest extra money in to their games unless they're forced to. They want every game to make as much profit as conceivably possible and then even more than that while investing as little as humanly possible and avoiding possible extra investments no matter what. If that means cutting costs by limiting content releases or carving up content to distribute it back to us at a slower pace or (worse) selling it to us at a premium, they will absolutely do it. Such is the common practice of all big triple A video game publishers and while SE hasn't acted nearly as bad as Activision or EA (yet!) doesn't mean they don't engage in the practices of the industry.

Also, just want to add, yes I know the whole purpose of a big company is to make profit, I get it. But that doesn't justify anything and it never will, the pursuit of profit is not some noble endeavor that is above criticism.

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Originally Posted by Khalithar

Because triple A game companies don't invest extra money in to their games unless they're forced to. They want every game to make as much profit as conceivably possible and then even more than that while investing as little as humanly possible and avoiding possible extra investments no matter what. If that means cutting costs by limiting content releases or carving up content to distribute it back to us at a slower pace or (worse) selling it to us at a premium, they will absolutely do it. Such is the common practice of all big triple A video game publishers and while SE hasn't acted nearly as bad as Activision or EA (yet!) doesn't mean they don't engage in the practices of the industry.

Also, just want to add, yes I know the whole purpose of a big company is to make profit, I get it. But that doesn't justify anything and it never will, the pursuit of profit is not some noble endeavor that is above criticism.

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(Sorry, but I can't resist. ^^)
TRIPLE AAAYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!

Yep, the whole Life Services thing ruins gaming.