This is good news.
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This is good news.
Even if April 1st is when their fiscal year starts this is SE we're talking about one of the biggest April Fools Day lovers. I mean they spent money on an Uber like add that featured chocobos. If this is somehow actually real then Congrats Yoshida.
Easily if you have no soul. I mean just look at a certain Survivor player who got other's to throw a competition to them because the friend/family member they got to spend some time with assumingly told said contestant their grandma died. Yet later we all find out she was alive and well.
Hopefully this'll help bring more funding and staff to FFXIV. As one of the most popular - and profitable - MMO's in the present day, it's a worthy investment.
Perhaps it'll help solve the housing crisis, too.
I wouldn't read too much into this as it pertains to the future of FFXIV. Across various gaming sites, there's been speculation for a while that former and maybe current FFXIV staff may be working on an unannounced game. This could be FFXVI (and Yoshi-P saying sometime mid-November that he wouldn't be opposed to making a high fantasy single-player FF game if enough fans asked him to), although it could be a side game (perhaps a new Tactics entry in collaboration with Matsuno, considering SE appears to have been pushing the Tactics brand a bit too hard lately - despite the Tactics series being dead outside of ports/re-releases for nearly a decade now - for it to be mere coincidence).
Every other SE development studio has been working on something else, whether it be FF7R or FFXV DLC. However, three key members of FFXIV development staff vanished during the Heavensward patch cycle with no word on what they've been working on since. To quote duckroll of ResetERA who had been keeping tabs on SE staff for the past few years...
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Several of the major team leads on FFXIV stepped down after Heavensward, including the director of The Last Remnant and the FFXII lead planner. :)
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In 2.0 and Heavensward, Hiroshi Takai and Mitsutoshi Gondai were assistant directors. Kazutoyo Maehiro was the main scenario writer. Takai was the director of The Last Remnant. Gondai was the lead battle designer for FFXIV. Maehiro was a lead planner on The Last Remnant and worked as a planner/designer for all of Matsuno's "Ivalice" games - FFT, VS, FFXII.
At the end of the Heavensward patch cycle, just before Stormblood, all three stepped aside. Stormblood is carried by new leads who were promoted from the respective teams. So we have a director, a battle planner, and a scenario writer, who worked on the most well received FF game in the last decade, suddenly doing nothing for about a year now.