Help me understand why PSN is needed to play this game.

[Huntington]

Just gonna throw this out there, if you're talking about having to pay the PSN monthly thing in order to play XIV... You don't. I don't pay that and i still play XIV. But maybe i misunderstood you.

I should have made it more clear. PSN regular to use is free, it's the PS+ that people pay for to get access to free monthly games and other things. My point was that even without paying the monthly, and just using the standard PSN "Silver" account we'll call it, you can still be locked out of XIV because PSN is for some reason still connected to the game.

Sony's servers aren't used to run XIV, the game is controlled and operated by Square Enix, they have their own servers for it, but if PSN goes down, I still need it to run XIV. Why is this?

I could see it in the future when they would want us to pay for the PS+, just so they're still making money off of people already paying for another 2 things just to play XIV, of which the fee monthly is going to be likely 100$ or over altogether, currency exchanges not withstanding since that differs based on region. Having PSN connected to it though doesn't make any sense. PSN doesn't go down when SE does maintenance, so why does XIV go down for Playstation users when PSN has maintenance? They should be separate from each other.