Quote Originally Posted by MageBlack View Post
So barring any major disasters, like all their servers somehow being physically destroyed, I don't see the game disappearing or going free to play. And the game would be shut down before ever going free to play.
I think that's too extreme, they already spent too much on both 1.0 and ARR to simply close shop and shut down everything, not to mention it would leave a pretty big hole in the FF series' timeline. If it ever goes F2P it'll go F2P and that'll be that. It won't be any time soon anyway, though it'd be a mild surprise if it happened before the expansion but not really, it still has some life as a P2P game.

Besides MMOs don't really die or fail when they go F2P, plenty of previously P2P games that went F2P are still going, even TOR is still kicking around. XIV was already technically buy to play at one point so it's not like it would be that different. I know there's the antecedent of XI never going F2P but that was released in a different era when MMOs didn't really have much competition and were all very different from each other and not just straight up blatant clones. Most P2P MMOs in the past 5 or so years have inevitably gone F2P, so one can never be too certain and say it'll never ever go F2P, just like one can't declare for sure it'll go F2P any day now I guess.