don't call it investement then call it cash flow then. Excuse the comparison, but if you invest in a movie theatre, you can't keep letting people in for free forever without eventually running out of working capital. If you also own a car wash and a laundry map, you can "borrow money" from those businesses for a little bit, but eventually you will want to see your theatre in the green.
Another more related example is that of the Nintendo Wii. In terms of graphics and such, the Wii is obviously a little behind, but who was Nintendo marketing to? They new that the "hardcore gamer" was going to buy the Wii regardless, meaning, the hardcore gamer has all the systems etc. What they did is market their games to the non-gamer. In otherwords, stores in the U.S were sold out of the Wii for months and months because not just gamers were buying the system, but also moms, grandparents. everyone.
Now let's tie that in with the gamer and FFXIV. The people left in this game are the hardcore FFXIV fan. If those people leave now because they don't want to pay a subscription, I'd put a fair amount of money down to say that when 2.0 is released and is awesome... those people will be back. Square Enix has one shot to hit this project "out of the park" and that is at PS3 release. At that point they will have a chance to market this game to the "general gamer" with a system (PS3) that is widely owned. If they lose players now, at least they will have a little cash flow from the remaining base, so that when the time comes for judgement day, they can save this project.
