why was hildebrand so short this patch and when is the next one

[TheFatHousecat]

Pretty cool you know all the details regarding budget and development!

Wall of text incoming!

SE rarely gives exact numbers, but it's not hard to connect the dots when you look at their quarterly fiscal reports. FFXIV 1.0 cost over 400 million dollars to develop, and it had a /fraction/ of the content of 2.0 & 3.0. And while a fair bit of 2.0/3.0 development cost goes to paying for voice acting for MSQ- Hildibrand doesn't have a voice, so surely the content doesn't cost much to develop, right? Here's the rub, though: Hildibrand isn't a oneshot quest, and it isn't just text and cutscenes. They've attached FATEs and instanced battle content to it. They've attached minions, emotes and glamour. If you know anything about development costs, you start to realize really quickly that 10-20m for all the Hildibrand stuff is probably a conservative estimate.

The problem with all this comes when you start to look into the value of those development dollars, which is generally figured out by looking at how much time X number of players spend on the content. They'll look at averages and they'll look at totals. And the average dollar-per-hour spent on Hildibrand stuff is going to be abysmal. My comment about people resubbing for a patch every 3 months to do Hildibrand quests for an hour isn't terribly far from the truth. So SE will look at this and think: "is there something else we could be spending this money on with a higher dollar-per-hour spent average?" The answer will invariably be "yes" and that's a bit reason why there was a big gap between the last Hildibrand stuff and this new stuff. They were looking for better ways to spend their money. But eventually people begged for it enough that they felt cornered into bringing it back.

Compare that to something on the opposite side of the spectrum like the Coil storyline. Yoshi was pretty open about how far over budget they went, and a large part of that was because of all the CG cutscenes and the voice acting. It was incredibly immersive, with just about the highest production value we can get from an MMO. It had actually interesting characters with actually interesting plot developments- which affected the entire game setting. By comparison, Hildibrand is largely inconsequential to the plot- a cheesy detective side-story. Anyway, it can be argued that since only 5% of the game population experienced the Final Coil storyline up to completion by the end of 2.0, that it was money wasted. But look again at the average dollar-per-hour spent. How many hundreds of hours did people spend on coil progression, and farming for gear? That may not be your thing, and that's fair- but the point is, in spite of only 5% of the population taking true advantage of this content, SE is still technically getting more bang from its buck from this type of thing.

You know what they get even more bang from their buck from? Dungeon roulette. Primals with rare mounts. PVP with ranked rewards. They put much much less money into this stuff than something like Coil, and it keeps an even larger segment of the population busier for an even greater number of hours, on average, per player. So in that sense, this content is at the top and middle of the bell curve, giving the greatest returns on value. This is also, incidentally, the stuff they try to incentivize through daily/weekly chore goals. And as much as that sucks, there's a good reason for it (financially).

So what does this all mean? Is Hildibrand or similar content a 'waste' of development dollars if people find enjoyment in it? Well, to the players who like it: no, absolutely not. The same can be observed about Coil storyline stuff. But while, in the end, SE are pumping many times more dollars into stuff like Coil, they're also getting a lot more value from it. However, MORE people do the Hildibrand thing, in spite of it's comparatively lower value, so those subs add up to MORE revenue. Raid stuff = (potentially) more value. Wonky throw-away side quest stuff = (potentially) more revenue.

To seriously answer OP's question: we're getting less of everything lately, not just Hildibrand. We used to get 3 dungeons per patch, now 2. We used to get huge zones in coil with deep, interesting story and now we get little circle/box arenas with silly, annoying gobbie junk nobody cares about. We used to get a lot more from our wonky side-quests, too. We're getting less of it all now because resources are being diverted to other projects, like FFXV, Final Fantasy VII Remake, etc. Same thing they did with FFXI to fund this game. Exactly the same.

Until those projects are finished, or SE decides to pull resources back to FFXIV, we'll either get a little bit less of everything or certain things will have to be cut out entirely. I'm sore about Hildibrand because it was one of the things they had originally cut to make room for other stuff. Now that it's back, the money they're putting into Hildibrand has to be taken from something else.

And the bottom line is: this game can exist just fine without Hildibrand. I'm not sure it can exist without the other stuff.