If my son buys the game on Steam can he just login to his character hes levelled up on the windows version and continue playing on Steam with his current characters.
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If my son buys the game on Steam can he just login to his character hes levelled up on the windows version and continue playing on Steam with his current characters.
You cannot swap between these two versions of FF14. If you have windows you're stuck with windows. If you have steam, you're stuck with steam. Currently they're the only versions that cannot swap back and forth.
If you want him to play on a steam account specifically, he would have to have a new service account. If he currently has the windows version of the game you can just add it to steam as a non-steam game and load it through steam.
Edit to add: The only time this isn't true is if he is a free trial player at the moment. Until you buy the game you account wont be locked into steam or windows.
You have to buy ffxiv for every platform each time. Be it consoles or for PC. Many games are doing the same because its a profit.
There's no reason to buy the Steam version if you have the Windows version. Are you having an installation or tech issue that you're trying to fix by buying the Steam version? It likely isn't going to work. I can't think of any advantage the Steam version would have over the Windows launcher. It just adds more overhead.
This is not actually true, Steam offers regional pricing on subscription that you only get if you sub through Steam, this shouldn't affect anyone living in the US, but it is a big deal for me personally as I am from Brazil, I end up paying like 60% or so of the subscription cost because of said regional pricing, and perhaps other countries experience something similar.
That's my bad, I didn't know that was an option on Steam, I thought the sub itself still goes through squenix accounts. However it seems OP is in Canada and I have seen many people mistakenly attempt to fix tech issues by assuming they can bypass the launcher with Steam, which is not the case.